The population attributable fraction (PAF) is commonly used in public health to signal the contribution, or importance, of a risk factor to a health outcome. The PAF poses the counterfactual:1 what would happen if the considered risk factor was entirely absent from the population? In The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Katharine Looker and colleagues2 estimated that globally, in 2016, 29·6% (95% uncertainty interval 22·9–37·1) of new HIV infections acquired via sexual transmission were attributable to herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) infection.
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Mishra et al. (2019) studied this question.
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