Chicago Tribune - July 7, 2007
Laurie Goering, Tribune foreign correspondent, lgoering@tribune.com

New estimations of the country's infection rate, based on a nationwide house-to-house survey with blood sampling as well as on prenatal blood tests of pregnant women, suggests the country has about 2.47 million people infected with the virus that causes AIDS, a sharp drop from the previous estimate of 5.7 million, said Anbumani Ramadoss, the national minister of health and family welfare.

That reduced estimate, which mirrors similar revisions of estimates of AIDS prevalence in a variety of African countries, drops India from first in the world in HIV infections to third place, behind South Africa and Nigeria.

Indian officials called the revised estimates good news for the country, which now appears to have around 0.36 percent of people 15 to 49 infected with HIV rather than the previously thought 0.9 percent. The reduced estimate indicates India's epidemic is still focused mainly in high-risk groups -- prostitutes and their clients, intravenous drug users and gay men -- rather than in the general population as in South Africa, where the infection rate among people 15 to 49 years old is 16 percent.

Health officials said Friday that India's infection rate also appears to be dropping slightly overall, suggesting that increasingly intensive efforts to stop the spread of the disease are working.

India "has been able to successfully contain this epidemic," said Naresh Dayal, an official with the country's Health Ministry.

But health officials warned that continuing education and prevention efforts are important to ensure India's AIDS problem remains at a manageable level. With a population of 1.1 billion people, the country could still be suffering perhaps 300,000 new infections with the AIDS virus each year, said Prabhat Jha, a researcher with the Center for Global Health Research at the University of Toronto.

Under a program announced Friday, the country will spend $2.8 billion over the next five years to try to expand condom use, more than double the number of people taking AIDS tests each year and triple the number of people receiving AIDS treatment drugs.

"Surely all of this is good news," said Ashok Alexander, the director of Avahan, an Indian arm of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which along with USAID, the United Nations and other agencies are supporting India's anti-AIDS efforts.

But India's huge population, combined with poorly understood and higher-than-average infection rates in a few regions, suggest that "there is only one conclusion: Our work is still cut out for us," Alexander said.

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