UN overstated AIDS epidemic

NY Times:

The United Nations’ AIDS-fighting agency plans to issue a report today acknowledging that it overestimated the size of the epidemic and that new infections with the deadly virus have been dropping each year since they peaked in the late 1990s.

The agency, Unaids, will lower the number of people it believes are infected worldwide, to 33.2 million from the 39.5 million it estimated late last year.

The statistical changes reflect more accurate surveys, particularly in India and some populous African countries. Some epidemiologists have criticized for years the way estimates were made, and new surveys of thousands of households in several countries have borne them out.

In only a few countries, such as Kenya and Zimbabwe, do the figures reflect widespread behavioral changes, such as decisions by many people to have sex with fewer partners.

Excerpts from the report were given to the news media in advance for release this evening, but an embargo on it was broken by other news organizations. Despite the revised estimates, the epidemic remains one of the great scourges of mankind. This week’s analysis predicts that 2.1 million people died of AIDS in the last year, and 2.5 million were newly infected — or about 6,800 every day.

The agency now believes that the number of new infections each year with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, probably peaked in the late 1990s, or by 2001, at about 3 million.

Although new infections have dropped, the number of people with the disease is growing because more people infected with H.I.V. are living longer, thanks to antiretroviral drugs. With the world’s population growing, the agency believes that the percentage of adults who are now infected remains roughly constant, at about 0.8 percent.

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Not mentioned in the article is that the decline coincides with the Bush Administrations' huge increase in spending on AIDS prevention in Africa and other countries. I am sure that the Times and the UN would not want to give President Bush any credit. I suspect also that the "accounting" problem was a convenient way to push for more money from the US and other donor countries.

The Bush administration is not very good at tooting its own horn, but it really should look at crediting its effort with reducing this epidemic. Mugabe may want to get some of the credit for the reductions in Zimbabwe, where his famine and starvation may be out pacing the disease.

Heh. Scrappleface says the UN can always find another catastrophe to kill off people.