S. Africa health dept sharply hikes AIDS estimate
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New figures from South Africa suggest that more than 6.5 million of the country’s 47 million people may now be HIV-positive. The figure is a sharp jump on previous estimates and is likely to fuel debate on the extent of the country’s HIV/AIDS pandemic.
The Department of Health, releasing a 2004 study of women at antenatal clinics, said results indicated that between 6.29 and 6.57 million South Africans now carry the HIV virus against 5.6 million at the end of 2003.
The figures contradict a May study by Statistics South Africa, the state statistical agency, which estimated that about 4.5 million South Africans were infected with HIV - a toll which would drop South Africa behind India as the country worst hit by the global pandemic.
Extrapolations from data at antenatal clinics, where pregnant women have their blood tested, form the basis for most estimates of HIV prevalence in Africa, home to more than 25 million of the estimated 39 million people infected with HIV worldwide.
But the method has been criticised in some African countries as exaggerating the spread of HIV/AIDS on the continent.
Debate flared last year with a study purporting to show that U.N. estimates of AIDS prevalence in Kenya were inflated and cutting the projected number of Kenyan adult HIV infections to 1 million from as many as 3 million.
UNAIDS, the United Nations AIDS agency, dismissed the study’s conclusions as unfounded, saying differences in methodology could account for different numbers and standing by its original forecasts.
FIGURES QUESTIONED
South African officials including President Thabo Mbeki have also questioned the severity of the HIV/AIDS crisis, infuriating activists who blame the government’s slow response for increasing numbers of AIDS deaths in the country.
The Department of Health study said that 29.5 percent of the pregnant women surveyed nationwide were HIV positive, up from 27.9 percent in 2003. In KwaZulu-Natal, the worst affected province in the country, the HIV prevalence rate among pregnant women was more than 40 percent, it said.
The department acknowledged that its latest estimates for national prevalence assumed that HIV prevalence among all pregnant women was the same as that for those visiting antenatal clinics, and that HIV prevalence for all women between the ages of 15-49 was the same as that in pregnant women.
Some statisticians questioned the results.
Professor Rob Dorrington, head of the Centre for Actuarial Science at the University of Cape Town, said the department’s new estimates were “undoubtedly too high”, although he told Business Day newspaper the mixed messages from government were complicating South Africa’s response to HIV/AIDS.
“Is it any wonder the public is confused when the same government offers estimates that differ by between 2 million and 2.5 million?” he said.
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