1. It would be pretty simple to write a computer simulation to test this, no? Would anyone care to do so?
2. I don't know enough about the AIDS situation in Africa to say whether it is empirical evidence for or against this paper. Is anyone else more familiar with this?
I'm on it. Results in a later reply.
Don't just take my word for it, run my code: http://github.com/philwelch/SexSim
If anyone's interested, let me know and I can work up a blog post and improve my code. (Also, if my code is wrong, let me know or send me a patch.)
EDIT: I have a bug which may invalidate my results. Stand by for fix.
EDIT 2: No, results still valid. Possible fix pushed.
And your simulation is a lot more interesting than anything found in that article.
I may want to play with adding condoms to the simulation, though. My transmission rate is based upon the HIV transmission rate for unprotected anal sex, which is pretty clearly an upper bound--that's why especially slutty or outgoing populations get >50% infection rates after 20 years seeding from 1% infection rate. You also see the odd run where you just have a 1% infection rate after 20 years--probably cases where the randomly seeded HIV+ individual is especially shy and has a low sex drive.
Also, it would have been a lot more interesting if I could have generated random values along different distributions, or...well, lots of things would have helped.