AIDS mortality no longer decreasing

In 2000, 106 men and 26 women died of AIDS in the Netherlands. The number of deaths from this contagious disease has stabilised in recent years after an initial period of growth to a peak of 402 for men in 1994 and a subsequent sharp fall. For women the peak was in 1995, when 59 women died of AIDS.

AIDS deaths

For men in particular there has been a remarkable fall since 1995 in deaths caused by AIDS. Since 1982, when the first deaths from this disease were recorded, more than 3,700 people in the Netherlands have died from AIDS. Ten percent of these were women.

Young age group

Over 47 percent of AIDS deaths are men in the age group forty to fifty, while for women the age group with most AIDS deaths (just over 38 percent) was between thirty and forty. The average age of men dying form AIDS was 45.1 years, substantially lower than the average age of 71.5 years for all men who died in 2000. For women these ages were 41.6 and 77.8 years respectively.

AIDS deaths, 2000

Many immigrants

Nearly forty percent of people dying from AIDS in the Netherlands in 2000 were immigrants, 14 percent western and 26 percent non-western. For women the percentage was higher: 54 percent of AIDS death were immigrants, eight percent western and 46 percent non-western. For other causes of death the percentage of immigrants is lower: 19 and 17 of deaths for men and women respectively. Therefore relatively more immigrants die of AIDS than of other causes. At the moment an estimated 13 to 18 thousand people in the Netherlands are HIV positive. However, because of increasingly effective drugs the number of annual deaths from AIDS is not expected to rise in the near future. Figures form the Health Inspectorate on decreasing numbers of new AIDS cases also point in this direction.

Gerard Verweij