(Not) Everybody Has AIDS
Michael C. Moynihan | November 20, 2007, 11:29am
The
Los Angeles Times,
Washington Post and Drudge lead with the United Nations' staggering recalculation of global AIDS figures, just months after India cut its estimate of those infected by more than 2 million. According to the
Post, "The United Nations' top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade, according to U.N. documents prepared for the announcement." A pair of experts interviewed by the
Post suggest that the overestimation of infections was part of a deliberate deception aimed at raising more aid money:
"There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda," said Helen Epstein, author of "The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS." "I hope these new numbers will help refocus the response in a more pragmatic way."
...
James Chin, a former World Health Organization AIDS expert who has long been critical of UNAIDS, said that even these revisions may not go far enough. He estimated the number of cases worldwide at 25 million.
"If they're coming out with 33 million, they're getting closer. It's a little high, but it's not outrageous anymore," Chin, author of "The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology With Political Correctness," said from Berkeley, Calif.
Chin, a clinical professor of epidemiology at the University of California at Berkeley, has been making this argument for some time now; his book, according to the AFP, accuses "UNAIDS of intentionally inflating its estimates of how many people have HIV in order to dramatize the epidemic and win more money from donors." Today, he tells the Associated Press, UNAIDS "finally got caught with their pants down."
The Post's story here, Los Angeles Times' here, and New York Times' here.
(Headline reference here)
Lise | November 20, 2007, 6:32pm | #
Paul, do you mean something like this:
From "Out of Africa" (part 1) SPIN, 1993, C. Farber
I also tried very hard to obtain these statistics. Finally. I was told they do not exist. Even in the relatively prosperous Cote d'lvoire, no actual death statistics are kept.
One hesitates to burst a bubble that may he helping people, however inadvertently but in this case, as in most situations like this, the money is being trapped at an administrative level, and hardly trickling down to the people who need it. It may well be that just as it is argued in the West figures had to be inflated or else nobody would care, but in Africa the consequence of this terror is far from innocuous. It has caused a deep psychological wound that one relief worker, Philippe Krynen, calls ,"AIDS brain," in which people are so convinced they will die they actually get sick, so strong is the belief that a deadly virus has spread like wildfire, and that there is no escaping it.
When Krynen, a French nurse working with AIDS orphans in Kagera, a region of Tanzania near the Uganda border, first came to the area, he realized that the first thing he had to do was get a real answer to the question of how many people were "infected" with HIV, "When I came here," he said, "people had completely given up. Nobody was interested in safe sex that's only an option if you think you have a chance. So we decided to test everybody to find out who was not infected. I figured that those who were not infected could become leaders and inspire the others. We tested 150 Tanzanians. We were expecting to find up to 50 percent HIVpositive. We found 5 percent."
But Krynen reasoned that the sample was not representative of the general population, that the age groups and levels of education were different. So he did another round of testing, this time of 842 people the entire adult population of a village. Of those, 116 were positive, or 13.5 percent. "We had people who were symptomatically AIDS patients:" Krynen said. "They were dying of AIDS, but when they were tested and found out they were negative they suddenly rebounded and are now perfectly healthy." Krynen even came across an HIVpositive sixyearold, whose parents are both negative and who has never been to a hospital or received a transfusion. The only time she ever had an injection was as part of Unicef's basic vaccine program.
"Everybody talks about development in Africa, but there is no such thing," Krynen said. "There is only survival. And now survival is made more difficult because there is no hope for tomorrow. In the villages where I work, people are totally overwhelmed by the media campaign, which always repeats the same thing-that you're dead. That everybody is infected. This is what they call awareness. We are paying a very high price for this gross exaggeration. The whole community is washed up, despondent, because of this psychological pressure."
Krynen also did a rough count of how many orphans were in Kagera due to AIDS. In Africa, a child is considered an orphan if either or both parents die. Krynen surveyed 160 villages and arrived at a very rough estimate. "Nobody keeps track of the death toll here," he said. "Maybe in some hospitals they do, but they'll only keep the figures for two or three months and then they'll scrap them because they need the paper." He estimated that there would be some 17,500 AIDS orphans in Kagera. "These figures were virtually meaningless," he said. "I made them up myself, but they wound up getting sent off to Kalizizo, and from there to Dar es Salaam, and then to the National AIDS Control Program. Then, to my amazement, they were published as official figures in the WHO 1990 book on African AIDS. After that, every six months the figure just kept jumping up. By now, the figure has more than doubled, based on I don't know what evidence, since these people have never been here. Today they say that there are 50,000 AIDS orphans in Kagera."
Mulondo agrees: "This safe sex business is not working. The rate of promiscuity is increasing because people don't give a damn. They've been told that 80 percent are infected, that they're going to die, there's no way out, so people are trying to enjoy themselves. Many people have said to me, 'What's the point? We're all gone anyway. We're dead.' This is the result of these exaggerated AIDS scare campaigns."
"If people die of malaria, it is called AIDS," Krynen said. "If they die of herpes, it is called AIDS. I've even seen people die in accidents and it's been attributed to AIDS. The AIDS figures out of Africa are pure lies, pure estimate."
