Replies

That last sentence in the excerpt means laboratory evidence. So much for the claim that these diagnoses in Africa are just presumptive diagnoses based only on clinical presentation, i.e. appears ill, malnourished, fever, etc.

I read a prediction, probably by the World Health Organization, about 10 years ago that said AIDS--if unchecked--would take out 50 percent of the world's population by 2040.

This is a link about how circumcision may cut the HIV rate by 60 percent. This is not new. There was an article in Scientific American last year on the same issue:

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article1217831.ece

So, abstinence works? Hmmm /sarc

"So much for the claim that these diagnoses in Africa are just presumptive diagnoses"

Yes. Or rather, no.

Firstly, Kenya is just one country on a huge continent, and not the poorest. A statement about Kenya cannot be generalized to the entire continent.

Secondly, even here they are not claiming to have tested all suspected patients, but merely to have made a "large scale survey," which is rather vague.

All this tells us is the rate of infection among the sample (of unknown size and composition) that they *selected* (based on criteria unknown to us).

In other words, it tells us only that there is some unknown number of cases in Kenya.

The fact remains that countries in Africa simply do not have the money to do the testing that would be required to confirm their claimed infection rates.

That last sentence in the excerpt means laboratory evidence. So much for the claim that these diagnoses in Africa are just presumptive diagnoses based only on clinical presentation, i.e. appears ill, malnourished, fever, etc.

Well, not exactly. Until the new millennium (or in some cases, the late 1990s), the UN-favored methodology for obtaining AIDS rates in Africa was to use AIDS rate from so-called sentinel testing of pregnant women who visited health clinics as a proxy for the country's rate. National random voluntary blood or saliva testing is a fairly new phenomenon.

The problem with the old methodology is that most clinics are in urban areas, where the AIDS rate is higher, pregnant women are at a higher risk of getting AIDS since they obviously haven't been abstinent or used condoms, and African women tend to be more at risk for AIDS than African men for some reason. So the AIDS rate in many African countries was overstated, often by a factor of about 1.5x-2x, and in Sierra Leone's case, by a factor of 7x.

More info here:
How AIDS in Africa Was Overstated (Washington Post, Craig Timberg 4/6/06)

I am constantly amazed at what escapes the obvious. If 6 bucks keeps kids from getting an education in Kenya, why in the heck don't they allow kids to wear whatever they can to school. A million bucks would have saved the lives of 166,000 girls, but put some lame researchers out of a cushy job.

In Kenya, large-scale surveys based on H.I.V. blood tests have found that infection rates, at less than one-half of 1 percent among teenage boys, rise to 7 percent among men 25 to 29, and peak at 9 percent among those 40 to 44.

These percentages are no where near what we are told in other media. We are told half the population has aids and send more money.

I still stand by my opinion and observation that a lot of what people think is aids is caused by other things like malnutrition.........unfortunately there is no longer money for malnutrition, only AIDS.