In 2002, UNAIDS reported that:
There are 42 million people living with HIV/AIDS world-wide. 38.6 million of these are adults, 19.2 million are women and 3.2 million are children under the age of 15. Five million new infections with HIV occured in 2002 of which 4.2 million were adults and 2 million of them were women.
It also argued that:
Best current projections suggest that an additional 45 million people will become infected with HIV in 126 low- and middle-income countries (currently with concentrated or generalized epidemics) between 2002 and 2010—unless the world succeeds in mounting a drastically expanded, global prevention effort.
The agency was especially pessimistic about India, suggesting that “there remains considerable potential for growth in India… where almost 4 million people are living with HIV.”
In subsequent years, UNAIDS has reported 12.6m deaths from the disease. So some quick maths suggests that – absent “a drastically expanded, global prevention effort” – UNAIDS would have been expecting 55-60m people to be living with HIV by now.
So what are the most recent figures? 33.2m people are now believed to be living with the virus. A miracle, no?
Well no, it’s not. Just last year, 39.5m people were reported to be infected.The sudden fall is not due to anything other than better data. 2.5m Indians, for example, are now thought to be infected. The figure reported last year was 5.7m. Quite a drop.
On top of that, far from spiralling out of control in 2002, UNAIDS now believes the epidemic peaked as far back as 1998 (see slide 4). That year (using corrected data), there were 3m new infections. Last year, there were around 2.5m
UNAIDS defence? According to its director of monitoring and evaluation, accurate data are too expensive to collect regularly, with a household survey costing $2-3m per country.
What a lame excuse! The world is now spending $10bn a year fighting the epidemic. In comparison, a few tens of million on research is chump change.
