India: Economic Growth & Development

Sunday, December 17, 2006

India Has Fewer HIV Infections Than UN (Over) estimates

In a front page story on April 6 2006, the Washington Post finally acknowledged that HIV/AIDS cases in Africa have been grossly exaggerated. The numbers were exaggerated in order to generate more money for the U.N., in a modern form of cruelty, despicable exploitation of sick, suffering and dying people.

Exaggerated claims & doomsday predictions being made for India were thoroughly debunked by Ashutosh Seshablaya in this article. Seshabalaya showed that, even if one accepted the grossly inflated U.N. numbers, HIV prevalance per capita in India is far lower than in South Africa and not significantly different from the USA, UK etc. Now, a
recent study strongly suggests that the number of people afflicted with HIV/AIDS in India could be far lower than current U.N. estimates.

4 comments:

ecophilo said...

Nice blog and a nice line of thought. Perhaps you should post more often.

RameshJ said...

From the Article

"the government bases its figures on data collected from pre-natal clinics, sexual health clinics and public hospitals."

The United Nations AIDS chief in India, Denis Broun, calls it a good study, but says it is too early to tell whether it is valid for India's entire billion-plus population.

"It has good methodology, it has a good size of the sample and the quality of the study is great," said Broun. "We are a little more concerned about the conclusions, which are drawn from it. It is difficult to draw conclusions from one district and apply them to the whole of India."

hmm..So while extrapolating government hospital data to the entire population is considered correct by the UN, doing a similar extrapolation is considered wrong when done by some one else.

sanjay said...

Good observation rj. I was a bit disappointed to hear the Minister Of Health, Ramadoss, use the same illogical reasoning. Doesn't give much confidence in the health ministry.

sanjay said...

Thanks for your thoughts neelakantan.