This doctor knew India’s AIDS numbers were highly inflated

[Guest guest]

[Moderators note on references to Dandona et al on HIV data in India follows the

main text of the article}

This doctor knew India's AIDS numbers were highly inflated

Sonu Jain

His survey in Andhra's Guntur convinced Lalit Dandona there were less

than 3.5 mn cases in India. Now, Govt revises number from 5.7 mn to

2.47 mn

NEW DELHI, JULY 11: It became official last week that India's AIDS

scare was exaggerated far above the actual infection number of 2.47

million.

But before that, when the country's estimate of infected people

neared 6 million, there was one man who knew government surveys were

getting it wrong.

Dr Lalit Dandona, a public health specialist and now professor of

international public health at University of Sydney, had first

indicated in a paper presented at an AIDS conference in Canada that

India could be overestimating its HIV/AIDS figures because of the

estimation method used.

Investigators from his team collected blood samples from 12,617

people aged between 15 and 49 in Andhra Pradesh's Guntur — one of the

worst affected areas in the state — to come to their conclusions.

Their method estimated that there were 45,900 people living with HIV

in Guntur, less than a half of the official number, 112,600.

He extrapolated the findings from Guntur to say that there may be

between 3.2 million and 3.5 million adults with the infection in the

entire country, much closer to the official figures released last

Friday.

" It's good to see corroboration of what we had suggested a year ago, "

Dandona told the The Indian Express from Sydney. " I had looked at my

data again and again and checked it many times over before I went to

the world with it. "

Unlike the individual samples that Dandona's team collect

ed, the official " sentinal surveillance " method used data from ante-

natal clinics, sexually transmitted infection clinics and public

hospitals. The government's estimates were inflated because the

clinics are used by the segment of society in which HIV is most

prevalent, said Dandona, who got his medical degree from AIIMS in New

Delhi and a public health degree from s Hopkins University in US.

At that time, though his study was widely acknowledged, officials

expressed caution at arriving at an all-India figure based on

Dandona's work. But unofficially, they were convinced.

He gave a presentation to National Aids Control Organisation on his

methodology. By then, the National Family Health Survey Data had

already been collected and were indicating the same trend as

suggested by him.

He said fears that reduced numbers would mean less funds for HIV are

baseless. " It is unlikely that the money for HIV will dry up. After

all, two and a half million is not a small number. " Dandona said he

is interested in developing a systematic evidence-base for effective

health systems. " There has to be strong science behind how diseases

are assessed and interventions are planned. And then assessing how

they do once implemented, " he told Express.

http://www.indianexpress.com/story/204678.html

________________

Moderators note: References to Dandona et al article on HIV data in

India

Lalit Dandona, Vemu Lakshmi, Talasila Sudha, G Anil Kumar and Rakhi

Dandona. A population-based study of human immunodeficiency virus in

south India reveals major differences from sentinel surveillance-

based estimates. BMC Medicine 2006, 4:31 doi:10.1186/1741-7015-4-

31

Dandona L et al. A population-based study suggests that the HIV

estimate for India needs major revision. Sixteenth International AIDS

Conference, Toronto, abstract ThLB0107, 2006.

Some of the earlier posting on Dandona et al's findings on AIDS INDIA

e FORUM

/message/7181

/message/6681

/message/6227

/message/6140