UN revises AIDS estimates but it remains a top killer

The United Nations group which focuses on the AIDS epidemic, UNAIDS, has revised it's original estimate of the number of people infected with the AIDS virus by more than six million.

The UN agency's original figure was in the region of 39.5 million, that has now been cut to 33.2 million, which includes 2.5 million children.

UNAIDS which is based in Geneva says however that the revised 16 per cent downward estimate was due to better data, in particular from India, rather than any change in the spread of the disease.

In India the estimated number of those infected was more than halved from 5.7 million to 2.5 million and the most affected regions remain the four southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.

There has been criticism over what some experts regarded as the inflated UN AIDS figures and many say the revision was overdue.

Jim Chin, a former WHO official who is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley says the new revisions are not enough.

Chin, the author of the 'AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology with Political Correctness', says the figures are still too high but are closer to reality; he estimates the number of cases worldwide at 25 million.

Suggestions that the UN had inflated the numbers to increase AIDS funding have been rejected by Kevin De Cock, head of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The UN report states that the rate of new infections peaked in the late 1990s at more than three million a year, but the survey found that there were still 2.5 million new infections in 2007 and approximately 2.1 million deaths from AIDS.

That means in fact that 6,800 people are infected with the HIV virus every day, and more than 5,700 people are dying from the disease.

UNAIDS has also revised its estimate of how long it takes for AIDS to kill if it is not treated, from 9 years to 11 years.

The estimates for the sub-Saharan African countries of Angola, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe were also significantly revised and experts attribute this to the availability of better data gathered from random household surveys rather from than blood samples taken at health clinics.

Though surveys involving randomly selected homes cost more, they do manage to access remote rural areas and present a more accurate picture of the general population.

Samples taken at clinics tend to over represent pregnant women, who become infected at a disproportionately high rate.

UNAIDS epidemiologist Karen Stanecki, says that household surveys are nevertheless not the "gold standard", because they can exclude high-risk groups such as prostitutes, homosexuals and intravenous drug users.

The AIDS crisis remains worst in sub-Saharan Africa, which had 68 per cent of new worldwide infections this year and 76 per cent of AIDS deaths.

Outside of Africa, the epidemic is largely concentrated in vulnerable groups such as men who have sex with men, sex workers and their partners, and drug users who inject.

The Caribbean is the second-worst-hit region with one percent of adults - or 230,000 people - carrying the virus; Haiti and the Dominican Republic account for two thirds of the total, while Britain, Spain, Italy and France have one of the largest HIV/AIDS epidemics in Europe.

The new data reveals that instead of an ever-expanding epidemic, new HIV infections have actually been dropping since peak levels in the late 1990s.

Paul De Lay, UNAIDS director of evidence, monitoring and policy, has warned against taking the new data as a sign that the battle against HIV is over.

The report says AIDS remains one of the leading causes of death globally and is the primary cause of death in Africa.