Inflation helps Zimbabwe fight AIDs.

Washington Post:

It's not only the prices of bread and eggs that are out of control in Zimbabwe, land of 4,000 percent inflation. For the man inclined to cheat on his wife, these are trying times. Keeping a mistress, visiting a prostitute or even taking a girlfriend out for beers is simply becoming too expensive, men say.

But their strain is Zimbabwe's gain in its fight against AIDS. Alone among southern African countries, Zimbabwe has shown a significant drop in its HIV rate in recent years. A major reason, researchers say, is the changing sexual habits of men forced to abandon costly multiple relationships.

"Those extramarital relationships, they're getting tough to sustain," said Thomas Muza, 37, who is struggling to support his wife and a mistress on the shrinking value of a math teacher's paycheck. Worth $50 a month at the beginning of June, it's now worth $17 and falling almost every day.

AIDS activists and some researchers long blamed the continent's high poverty rates for its unusually widespread HIV epidemics, arguing that poor medical care and hunger made Africans especially vulnerable to the virus, while financial need accelerated its spread by pushing women into prostitution.

Yet Zimbabwe's experience shows that the connection between AIDS and economics is not nearly so straightforward. The country has made strides against HIV during eight years of steep recession. Wealthier neighbors such as South Africa and Botswana, meanwhile, have struggled to curb new infections despite much higher levels of development and massive spending on the disease.

Many researchers now suspect that economic vitality -- expressed in rising truck traffic, burgeoning bar scenes and widening income disparity -- encourage the behaviors that fuel a sexually transmitted epidemic. But as men get poorer, they pare back their relationships, making them less likely to contract or spread HIV.

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Promiscuity causes the spread of aids and what this story really demonstrates is that promiscuity can be a function of excess cash, combined with poor morals and poor impulse control. You can bet that Mugabe did not have this consequence in mind when he started his unplanned economic disastrous program of racist economic "reform." This chart shows the correlation.