What's the number of people infected with HIV in 2007?!
Question:
What's the number of people infected with HIV in 2007?
Is it better than past years or worse?
Answers:
How AIDS in Africa Was Overstated
Reliance on Data From Urban Prenatal Clinics Skewed Early Projections
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 6, 2006; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...
KIGALI, Rwanda -- Researchers said nearly two decades ago that this tiny country was part of an AIDS Belt stretching across the midsection of Africa, a place so infected with a new, incurable disease that, in the hardest-hit places, one in three working-age adults were already doomed to die of it.
But AIDS deaths on the predicted scale never arrived here, government health officials say. A new national study illustrates why: The rate of HIV infection among Rwandans ages 15 to 49 is 3 percent, according to the study, enough to qualify as a major health problem but not nearly the national catastrophe once predicted.
cont... (link above)
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December 04, 2005
AIDS in China overstated?
AIDS is the most political disease in history, even in China. From the subscription—only South China Morning Post we learn that government officials in China believe that the extent of AIDS in China may have been overstated:
Authorities are reportedly in a bind over how to announce a new and supposedly more accurate HIV estimate that is significantly lower than previous figures.
Senior officials said the assessment was now being verified by the World Health Organisation and UNAids experts.
However, UNAids said it was waiting for Chinese officials to finalise the assessment.
Hao Yang , a deputy director of disease control with the Ministry of Health, admitted that the joint assessment for last year by the central government and UNAids was lower than the 2003 assessment, but the final figure would have to be announced by the government.
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Report: African AIDS Numbers Grossly Exaggerated
May. 05, 2000
WASHINGTON, DC (CWNews.com/LSN.ca) - In a watershed report, news web site WorldNetDaily.com has revealed that AIDS in Africa is defined differently than in America and that when the American definitions are used Africa's reported AIDS 'epidemic' disappears.
HIV tests which are essential to the AIDS diagnosis in America are not given in Africa except to tiny samples of the population. Rather in Africa the "Bangui Definition" created at a World Health Organization meeting in October, 1985 is used to define AIDS.
According to this definition, AIDS is considered present when a person is diagnosed with two of the following three symptoms combined with any one of several minor symptoms: "prolonged fevers for a month or more, weight loss over 10 percent, prolonged diarrhea." The minor symptoms include chronically swollen lymph nodes, persistent cough for more than a month, persistent herpes, and itching skin inflammation.
Critics said such symptoms can be the result of a host of causes other than AIDS in that war-torn and disease-ridden continent. Rather than the tens of millions of AIDS cases in each African country as has been reported, strict accounting for AIDS by the American definition reports a cumulative total of 794,444 cases from 1982 to November 1999, according to the WHO Weekly Epidemiological Record of November 26, 1999. African countries, WorldNetDaily.com noted, cooperate in the miscount since "AIDS" reports result in massive infusions of government and private donations.
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Study: Number of HIV/AIDS sufferers in India may be lower
The Associated Press
Published: December 12, 2006
NEW DELHI: Methods used to estimate the number of people with HIV/AIDS in India are flawed and the actual number of cases, thought to be the most of any country in the world, may be significantly lower, according to a study published Wednesday.
Health officials had praise for the report, but challenged some of its conclusions, saying the study's sample — from a single district of 4.5 million people — was too small to infer results for a country of more than a billion people.
The study, published in the London-based journal BMC Medicine, says methods used by the Indian government and United Nations to estimate the number of HIV/AIDS cases may be inaccurate.
"India may be overestimating its HIV burden with the currently used official estimation method," said the report, based on research in one district in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradhesh which indicated that the number of HIV-positive people may be only 40 percent of the official estimate.
The report said the investigators, headed by Dr. Lalit Dandona of the Administrative Staff College of India in Hyderabad, the capital of the Andhra Pradhesh, collected blood samples from 12,617 people aged 15-49 years, a representative sample of the adult residents of Guntur.
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Andhra Pradesh is the Indian state worst hit by AIDS and Guntur one of the worst-affected areas in the state.
Their method estimated there were 45,900 people with HIV in Guntur, compared to the estimate of 112,600 reached by the official method, which uses data from ante-natal clinics, sexually transmitted infection clinics and public hospitals, the study said.
Dandona said he believed there was no intentional effort to inflate the numbers, but the official method, known as sentinel surveillance, gave a flawed picture because the amount of HIV-positive people reporting to these clinics and hospitals was not representative of their true numbers in the population.
This is because patients at public hospitals are generally from poorer segments of the population where HIV infection rates are higher, and the fact that HIV/AIDS sufferers are referred there from private institutions, artificially raising their percentage.
While the report does not calculate the total number of HIV/AIDS sufferers in India, Dandona said his team believes the actual number to be between 3.2 million to 3.5 million adults. The government says there are 5.2 million infected adults and the United Nations estimates that 5.7 million Indians, including children, are infected.
"Even though our numbers are smaller, we are by no means suggesting that the problem is already taken care of," Dandona told The Associated Press by telephone.
Government officials were not immediately available for comment.
Dr. Denis Broun, the head of UNAIDS in India, called it "a good study and definitely useful," but noted that there were problems with Dandona's methodology.
The study compares its findings for the district with figures obtained from the sentinel survey for the whole state, which does not necessarily represent the district exactly, Broun said.
"Even if it were right in Guntur, it would not mean it is right all over India," he said.
Broun acknowledged that the U.N. has revised its figures downward in some cases in the past.
"I'm perfectly ready to consider that the (official) figures may be overstated, but the result just from Guntur is not enough yet," he said.
Broun said better figures would be available in early 2007 when the 2006 sentinel information and a national household survey are available.