[dsc]

"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.

[conservative in nyc]

The methodology for the 2003 Kenya survey is discussed here. I don't know if there was a more recent survey. The 2003 survey was a voluntary household survey of a large sample of the Kenyan population.

According to the Washington Post story I linked in my prior response, these new national surveys (most done by ORC Macro of Maryland) have shown that AIDS rates in most African countries were much lower than the UN has historically been reporting based on so-called sentinel surveys of preganant women.