UN says AIDS in India far worse than figures show

According to a UN Aids expert, the number of new HIV cases in India is far more than official data shows and epidemics in some pockets are alarming.

India, which has 5.1 million people living with HIV/AIDS, is second only to South Africa, announced earlier this year that new infections had fallen dramatically to 28,000 in 2004 from 520,000 in 2003.

The announcement has invoked disbelief among voluntary groups.

Peter Piot, the executive director of UNAIDS, says he does not believe that India could have had such a drop, and the figure of only 28,000 new infections is impossible.

Piot says that in some districts across the country with populations of several million, as many as four percent or more adults were infected and a 400 percent fall in 2004 would be a "miracle".

Speaking from Guwahati, the main city of India's remote northeast, during a visit to pressure authorities in the region to do more to fight AIDS, Piot says there are a number of states where reporting of cases is weak.

His comments have come ahead of the release of the U.N.'s annual global report on AIDS and he does not say what UNAIDS felt the real number of new cases was in 2004.

Piot says two of India's most populous states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar with a combined population of more than 250 million, have poor surveillance.

India's state-run National AIDS Control Organisation says 0.92 percent of the country's adult population is living with HIV and there are six states, and possibly a seventh, with an infection rate of more than one percent.

Piot also says that the AIDS picture in India, which has 29 states and more than a billion people, was complicated with new infections falling in some areas and rising in others.

For instance, new infections were falling in urban areas but rising in rural areas in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

Experts say the spread of the deadly HIV virus is made worse by millions of poor male migrants who go to cities for work, some become infected by prostitutes and pass it on to their wives in rural areas.

Piot believes that the Indian government and voluntary groups need to boost efforts and expand small but well-managed anti-AIDS projects.

He says that many HIV-positive people in India's northeast have been left out of nationwide HIV counts and not all those accounted for were getting anti-retroviral drugs.