India is celebrating the data that showed the number of HIV infected people have come down by half to 2.47 million. The recently released estimate data has tried to give people of India a cause to laugh and laugh on our leaders. The National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) has opted to choose more unknown methods than known ones in its methodology to find the new figure.
In 2006, the government had applied some different approaches to find the real number of HIV affected people in the country. In those approaches the count was restricted to ’sentinel’ surveys. Several UN agencies as being the best way to track the AIDS epidemic were somehow pushed India’s approaches.
Now, this time, the government opted to appendage the results of sentinel surveys with community data. According to this process, an HIV/AIDS component was included in the third National Family Health Survey (NFHS) that was conducted in 2005.
Now, the major question is that ‘can a combined effort give us more accurate numbers of HIV-affected people’? The NFHS survey that compiled HIV/AIDS data itself is actually complicated one. It has not released the results of sentinel surveillance for the current year. To compare final figures taken through different approaches cannot show the real performance of the national AIDS control program.
While stating the data, the Union Health minister Anbumani Ramadoss was looking satisfied without telling the reason. He gave the details that sentinel surveillance in pregnant women was expanded to 1,122 sites in 2006 from the earlier 703 sentinel sites but opted to remain silent on the results of the expanded exercise in so many sites.
The NACO’s latest estimate says that the occurrence of HIV/AIDS in India has to be scaled down from one in 100 or about 0.9 per cent to one in 300 or 0.36 per cent, or to 2-3.1 million from the previous estimate of 5.2 million.
Prabhat Jha of the Center for Global Health Research, Toronto, commented on this new data as it is hard to know how much of this drop is due to a new computer program rather than the efforts of the AIDS control program in India.
Health minister Ramadoss himself accepted that there was a minor reduction in prevalence. Now, if we compare the latest sentinel survey with the earlier one, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS is as much as where it was at 0.9 per cent.
Let me explain you the meaning of sentinel surveys. In this survey, the clinics intensively monitor pregnant women patients tested for presence of HIV for about eight weeks every year.
The main reason behind this practice is to know how the epidemic is progressing at specific locations. The STD-affected people also get a treatment here at that time to know how the disease was progressing in the so-called ‘high risk’ groups.
After a period of time, it gives a ‘good’ data to know whether HIV/AIDS spread is on an upward direction or not. This has led to a new approach this time round.
At the same time, the ministry of health and family welfare also decided to collect data under NFHS-3, by carrying out an AIDS test. But this approach under-represents certain populations because at least 100,000 people in the age group 15-54 voluntarily undertook an AIDS test.
According to this data, India has the prevalence of HIV/AIDS at 0.28 per cent. It means there are about 280 HIV positive cases in India those were actually detected by the surveyors.
The Integrated Behavioral and Biologic Assessment (IBBA) system data has assisted NACO in producing the ‘feel-good’ data. It was not the government but UNAIDS which made this fact public. Whatever the data says, one thing is very much clear that the numbers are still large and worrying so we should not let down our fight with this epidemic at any cost.
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