Parental bereavement: heterogeneous impacts of AIDS in Thailand

Over the coming decades in Thailand, aging parents whose adult children sicken with AIDS will bear burdens of caregiving and loss. Using demographic microsimulation, we show that the new, lower projections of the HIV/AIDS epidemic still imply that 8% of Thais over the age of 50 in 1995 will lose one or more children to AIDS before their own deaths. The proportion of all losses which are multiple losses can vary from 12% to 33% under a range of assumptions about plausible family-to-family heterogeneity in risks of infection.