Priscilla Reining

Reining died in her home on July 19, 2007, aged 84, from complications due to lung cancer.

In the mid-1990s, John and Pat Caldwell, mapping the progress of the AIDS epidemic in Africa, confirmed that the regions with the highest HIV/AIDS rates were also regions with the greatest number of uncircumcised males. A similar correlation was found in South Asia and Southeast Asia by a United Nations study (UNAIDS).

During the 1980s while on a visit to Tanzania, Reining noted that the people she had been studying, the Haya, were getting sick and the mortality rate within the region was becoming alarmingly high.

Reining is also responsible for pioneering the use of satellite imagery for social science research, demonstrating in 1973 that Landsat imagery could be combined with field data on villages to produce population and carrying capacity estimates for the Sahel (the arid belt between the Sahara and tropical Africa).

Priscilla Alden Copeland Reining (March 11, 1923 – July 19, 2007) was an American applied anthropologist. She was most remembered for her extensive work with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, especially throughout Africa. Priscilla Reining was the recipient of three anthropological degrees, from the University of Chicago. Reining's field of specialization was centered mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. During a Sudanese uprising in 1955, Reining and her family fled the country having "led a whole convoy of people." She worked for several years with the Haya people located in Tanzania in the early 1950s becoming one of the uppermost authorities on the village life of sub-Saharan peoples. One of her more notable studies was that of the Haya land tenure: