All the AIDS In the World Weighs About 3/4ths of An Ounce

While watching TV earlier I saw a Matthew McConaughey commercial and it sort of reminded me of Interstellar, which reminded me of Lincoln Lawyer, which reminded me of Dallas Buyers Club, which got me to thinking…how much does the AIDS virus weigh?

Turns out it doesn’t weigh very much, about 1.1 femtograms. It’s hard to put that in perspective since it is so unbelievably tiny and there isn’t much we come into contact with that even compares.

Anyway, using an average viral load of about 100,000/mL of blood, we come up with 11 picograms, still imperceptible to a human. From there, the math gets slightly easier, using an average of about 5 liters of blood in a human, we get 55000 picograms or .000055 milligrams. That’s what you have in one human, however, there are about 37 million people in the world with AIDS. Multiplying the 1 human load by 37 million brings us to 2035 milligrams, or 2.035 grams. Converting that into ounces gives us:

.72 Ounces

About the same as a couple of paperclips.

All the AIDS in every living person in the world comes out to the weight of about 2 paperclips. Crazy when you think about it. So many deaths and so much hysteria that could be wiped away in the blink of an eye with one spritz from a Clorox spray bottle.