Fig 2. Preferential infection and killing of highly promiscuous individuals.

(A) The ratio of infection among men (purple dots) and (non-FSW) women (green squares) increased with preferred contact degree (number of partners per year; plotted on logarithmic scale). The plot was created from 1000 independent simulation runs of single-strain epidemics of high prevalence, using logarithmic binning, right-censored at the top 1% of the male/female population (where rare classes result in strong stochastic variation). (B) The frequency distribution of the annual number of sexual contacts (realized contact degree) of males in uninfected populations (purple dots) and in populations with high-prevalence epidemics (green squares), based on median data from 1000 simulation runs. Highly promiscuous individuals were selectively depleted in the presence of the virus. (C) Boxplot of the exponents of power-law distributions fitted to male individuals in batches of 1000 independent runs with no virus, low and high prevalence epidemics, respectively. Boxes depict interquartile range, median is indicated by horizontal lines within the boxes, and whiskers extend to the farthest values that are not more than 1.5 times the box width away from the box. Medians (and IQR) of the exponents were 2.59 (2.56–2.62), 2.70 (2.67–2.75) and 2.85 (2.81–2.90) in the absence of the virus and with low or high prevalence epidemics, respectively; all pairwise comparisons between the three scenarios were statistically significant (p<10^–10; Wilcoxon rank sum test). Selective depletion among females is shown in S4 Fig. Simulation parameters were set as in Table 1.