HEALTH-INDIA: Claim of Plummeting HIV Cases Dismays NGOs

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jun 2 2005 (IPS) - Claims by India’s Health Ministry that the number of new HIV infections in the country have dropped by more than 90 percent have dismayed voluntary agencies and those who insist the government is in “denial mode” concerning sexually transmittable diseases.

Claims by India’s Health Ministry that the number of new HIV infections in the country have dropped by more than 90 percent have dismayed voluntary agencies and those who insist the government is in “denial mode” concerning sexually transmittable diseases.

According to figures released last week by the state-run National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO), which funds voluntary agencies to fight the virus, there were only 27,000 new infections in 2004-05. Those are in addition to the existing figure of 5.1 million total cases estimated in the previous year.

NACO also said 1,114 people died of AIDS in India in 2004-05, compared to 1,514 in the previous year.

Leading the NGO challenge to NACO’s figures is the Naz (India) Foundation, which works with HIV affected people. Naz volunteer Irfan Khan said such a decline was implausible. “What was the dramatic intervention that could have brought about such a change in people’s behaviour?” he demanded to know.

But there are less impassioned interpretations from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to NACO’s statistics – which have a history of confusion that is as old as the day in 1986 when the county’s first HIV/AIDS case surfaced.

“The official HIV estimates in 2003 as generated through NACO’s Sentinel Surveillance system was within a possible range of a minimum of 2.5 million to a maximum of 8 million infections,” Mulloli pointed out to IPS.

The mid-point of that range, after adding an additional 25 percent (to compensate for possible deficiencies), amounted to 5.1 million infections. The same method was followed this year to show a possible 5.127 million infections, added Mulloli.

He said this year’s figures, though showing a falling trend, are likely to be more accurate because there has been a 50 percent increase in the number of surveillance centres – from 450 in 2003 to 670 sites in 2004.

So vexed has the question of statistics been that Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss has plans to invite internationally known assessors to get the figures right and settle the issue once and for all.

Like his predecessors in the ministry, Ramadoss has found himself constantly confronted with wildly swinging projections released by funding agencies and the United Nations, which lack a sound basis.

In May, for example, Ramadoss had to challenge observations made by Richard Feachem, chief of the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, that the number of HIV/AIDS sufferers in India had exceeded those in South Africa, which has 5.3 million cases.

According to the joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) at the end of 2003 South Africa had an estimated 5.3 million HIV-positive residents while India had 5.1 million. But Feachem said India’s actual caseload was probably higher because of poor disease-reporting practices in the country. He suggested the number could be as large as 8.5 million people.

Feachem’s observations incensed Hindu nationalist organizations, which have demanded a public apology from him for releasing unsubstantiated statistics “just because he wants to pump into this country funds that it does not need”.

”We are tired of foreigners constantly bombarding us with inflated statistics telling us that we are faced with an HIV/AIDS epidemic when there are many other more serious and pressing issues to deal with in this country,” BP Singhal, who heads the Sanskritic Sewa Sangh (Organisation for the Protection of Culture) affiliated to the powerful Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), told IPS.

Funds to fight HIV/AIDS in India appear plentiful. Apart from the 57 million U.S. dollars available annually from the Word Bank and bilateral agencies, money has been coming in from major donors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has pledged 200 million dollars to tackle the virus.

While the World Bank provides most of the funding for NACO’s programmes, other major contributors include the British government’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The Bank itself has called for better statistics on the current state of the epidemic in order to improve efficiency in planning exercises such as the public provision of free antiretroviral therapy (ART) that NACO embarked on last year.

In a study called ‘HIV/AIDS Treatment and Prevention in India: Costs and Consequences of Policy Options’ and released last year, the World Bank observed it was ”unfortunate that estimates (for HIV/AIDS) are unreliable in India.”

NACO’s Project Director SY Qureshi has previously defended the latest figures, saying, “We have no motive to doctor figures. Our statistics are reliable and we don’t want to create an impression that we have controlled the disease and be complacent and we are certainly not in a state of denial.”

“The numbers have grown from one case in 1986 to 5.1 million now but India remains a low prevalence area. While 21-23 percent of South Africa’s population is infected, less than one percent of India’s one billion people are HIV positive, he added in a recent press conference.

HEALTH-INDIA: Claim of Plummeting HIV Cases Dismays NGOs

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jun 2 2005 (IPS) - Claims by India’s Health Ministry that the number of new HIV infections in the country have dropped by more than 90 percent have dismayed voluntary agencies and those who insist the government is in “denial mode” concerning sexually transmittable diseases.
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