African AIDS Statistics Overblown, Experts Say

By Pete Winn

CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer

October 25, 2007

(CNSNews.com) - With World AIDS Day just around the corner on Dec. 1, many AIDS activists continue to portray the 25-year-old epidemic as totally out-of-control.

“This year, tell the truth on World AIDS Day,” wrote former Ambassador Richard Holbrooke on Oct. 9 in the Washington Post. “Admit that we are still losing.”

Holbrooke, president of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said despite some progress, the epidemic continues to run unabated - especially in Africa, the continent hardest hit by AIDS.

But two epidemiologists - one at Harvard and the other at Berkeley - say this picture of AIDS isn’t borne out by the statistics. Indeed, both say that while the epidemic is still serious, it is no longer raging out of control in most of the world, and the numbers reflect that fact.

Even in Africa, once portrayed as being a cemetery continent where an estimated one in every three adults would die from AIDS, the epidemic now appears to be turning a corner, especially in some parts of East Africa.

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There is another reason why official infection rates are declining, the experts claim. Until recently, the world’s centralized AIDS agency - the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS, known as UNAIDS - has been providing the world inflated statistics.

Chin, who headed the World Health Organization’s AIDS statistics office in Geneva, Switzerland during the ’80s and ’90s, said that for decades UNAIDS could only provide estimates on the epidemic - and “has been over-estimating it for years.”

Since the introduction of highly accurate census-like population-based studies in the last five years, however, Chin said UNAIDS has been quietly forced to scale-back its estimates. (more…)