Number of people living with HIV in India could be lower than government estimates, research published in a medical journal said.
Research published in a medical journal says actual figures in India might be much lower than reported.
The number of people living with HIV in India could be lower than government estimates, research published in a medical journal has said, but the UN warned against drawing “hasty conclusions”.
Scientists who studied the prevalence of the virus in a district in Andhra Pradesh, which has the highest HIV rate in India, found it was less than half the government’s figure. Instead of 112,600 HIV cases in the district of Guntur, Lalit Dandona, of the Administrative Staff College of India, in Hyderabad estimates the number is about 45,900.
“The official method in India leads to a overestimation of the HIV burden in this district,” Dandona said in a report published in BMC Medicine. “The potential major implications of these findings for the overall HIV estimate for India need to be examined,” he said.
The UN estimates India has the largest number of people living with HIV/AIDS at 5.7 million and its anti-AIDS agency warned against extrapolating conclusions about the spread of HIV in the country from the Guntur study. India calculates the HIV caseload through surveillance in selected clinics and hospitals around the country. The sample size means the surveillance data from one particular district may not give an accurate picture of number of cases in the district itself. But in aggregate UNAIDS believes the data from the whole country gives a fair estimate.
“Even if we could find there is an overestimation in Guntur, it is not acceptable to conclude this applies to the whole of India,” UNAIDS India chief Denis Broun said.
Broun said population survey results often gave different results from other methods such as surveillance site data, but added the global body would review its current estimates if needed. In the past, UNAIDS figures for HIV-positive people in East Africa, including Kenya, were found to be overestimated.
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