A recent UNAIDS claim that the world
AIDS epidemic has stabilized is coming under attack by a former
UNAIDS epidemiologist.
In a new 357-page report released
Friday, the organization claims the global AIDS epidemic has
stabilized after peaking in the late 1990s. Former UNAIDS
epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani questions those findings.
On the blog www.wisdomofwhores.com used
to promote her book The Wisdom Of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels,
and the Business of AIDS, she questions the numbers published by
the organization, calling them “confusing.”
Compiling reports from previous UNAIDS
data, Pisani estimates the report is off by nearly 1 million people.
“By my calculations, that makes 33.97 million men and women, sons
and lovers, kids and grandparents, accountants and circus performers
and sex workers with HIV worldwide. So we're missing nearly a
million.”
UNAIDS estimates there are 33 million
people living with HIV worldwide.
She adds the numbers this way: “The
people living with HIV at the end of 2007 should be those who were
living with HIV at the end of 2006 (33.27 million) plus those who got
infected in 2007 (2.7 million, if you take the new figures), minus
the people who died (2.0 million).”
The UNAIDS report claims new infections
“declined from 3 million in 2001” to 2.7 million. If, however,
the 1 million figure was added into the new infections column, that
would represent an dramatic increase in 2007.
She concedes that estimates may change
over time. “But I'm still having trouble understanding how the
arithmetic works on this one,” she says, calling on the
organization to do a better job in explaining the discrepancy.
Another report released Saturday, this
one from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), showed
their AIDS U.S. estimates to have been underreported – by as much
as 40%.
“I sympathise with the writers of
reports like this, caught as they are between the need to show that
things are going well (so you should keep investing in HIV) and that
the situation is dire (so you keep investing in HIV),” Pisani
writes. “In truth, the key issue is not whether there are 2.5 or
2.7 million new infections. It is that somewhere between two and
three million people are still getting infected every year with a
completely preventable disease that we are spending over a billion
dollars a year on. That's a scandal that no amount of report-writing
has been able to change.”