Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2007. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Chicago Tribune - June 9, 2007
Laurie Goering, Tribune foreign correspondent
According to UN figures, India last year surpassed South Africa as the nation with the most people infected with the virus that causes AIDS. But a new as-yet-unpublished study, based on door-to-door interviews and testing instead of extrapolations from cases seen in pregnant women, indicates India's infection rate may have been substantially overestimated.
When the new study is released, "There's going to be a reduction and it could even be a significant reduction overall," said Ashok Alexander, the director of Avahan, an Indian arm of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which with the United Nations helped fund and oversee the government's National Family Health Survey.
Alexander said the survey, conducted between December 2005 and August 2006, is based on face-to-face interviews backed up by blood sampling, rather than the traditional method of extrapolating HIV prevalence rates from testing at prenatal clinics for pregnant women.
The extrapolation method has earlier caused overestimations of AIDS infection rates in some African countries, particularly Kenya, where estimates of the infection rate fell by over half using the new methodology. The overestimate in India appears to have come about because of regional differences between southern India, which has more prenatal clinics and a higher AIDS infection rate, and northern India, which has fewer clinics, Alexander said, and a significantly smaller problem with the virus.
"It's good news. The [infection] rate is coming down," said Alexander of the study results, which he indicated has not been released because of negotiations among organizers of the study as to what the figures mean.
But he warned that the new figures shouldn't precipitate a let-up in India's battle to control the virus, which affects as much as 1 percent of the population in India's more developed southern states.
But the study may confirm the Indian government's longtime contention that the disease is largely a problem for prostitutes and their clients, IV drug users and male homosexuals rather than for the country's general heterosexual population.
That is a marked difference from sub-Saharan Africa, the region worst hit by AIDS, where the disease is spread largely through multiple-partner heterosexual sex.
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