The Hindu Business Line : NACO's figures on AIDS kick up storm

STATISTICS have always been a bane for the National Aids Control Organisation (NACO). And last week's `revelation' by NACO, that new HIV infections in India for 2004 have dropped by close to 95 per cent from the previous year, has all but stirred a hornet's nest.

NACO has said that the number of new HIV infections for 2004-05 had increased by about 28,000, compared to 5.2 lakh the previous year.

"Epidemics do not behave in such a politically correct manner," says a representative with a pharma major that supplies anti-retrovirals, or anti-AIDS drugs, to NACO.

This scepticism is also being echoed by some NGOs agencies that work with AIDS patients.

"What has brought about this decline? Has there been a dramatic intervention that has changed the way people behaved over the last one year? Besides, the surveillance centres (involved in mapping the disease) are not really spread out in rural areas," says Mr Irfan Khan, co-ordinator with Naaz.

Significantly, this latest round of number crunching comes even as the National Council on AIDS is set to be launched this week, under the Chairmanship of the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh.

Last month, NACO was battling numbers again, when Prof Richard Feachem of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria said that India had crossed South Africa in terms of the total number of HIV patients in the country.

In 2002, Microsoft chief, Mr Bill Gates, had raised a storm when he cited a US report that projected the incidence of HIV/AIDS patients in India touching 25 million by 2010.

Dr S.Y. Quraishi, NACO's Project Director, told Business Line: "We have no motive to doctor figures. In December, I went through the same scepticism when I got to know the figures. So we invited experts and critics to discuss this. Even the Health Minister took two meetings (on the drop in infections)."

Dr Quraishi says that NACO's numbers are as scientific as it gets and vetted by independent agencies too.

In fact, he says, two years back changes were made to sites involved in the study and this could be the reason for the huge difference in numbers.

Meanwhile, NACO is in the process of "mainstreaming" the illness.

It is planning to bring the testing, counselling and free AIDS drugs rollout programmes into the ambit of hospitals and primary care centres, as opposed to "designated centres". This takes care of stigma and discrimination issues, he says.

Also on the anvil are multi-sectoral and inter-Ministerial plans involving private hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and various Ministries.

With 5.1 million HIV/AIDS cases, India stands second only to South Africa (5.3 million).

"Our statistics are reliable, but we don't want to create an impression that we have controlled the disease and be complacent. The numbers have grown from one case in 1986 to 5.1 million now and this is severe. It is a ticking time bomb," says Dr Quraishi, insisting that policy makers are not in a state of denial.

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