Wednesday, November 21, 2007

UN significantly revises AIDS estimates

9 days until World AIDS Day
Each day of the month leading up to World AIDS Day, I'll be posting some sort of resource, thoughts or action for you to use.

The UN has long been accused of inflating the number of AIDS infections in order to try and get more funding, public support, etc. Their most recent report, released just yesterday, helps to deflate some of those accusations by...deflating the number of infections reported.

Most significantly, they've dropped the estimated number of people living with HIV/AIDS from over 40 million to 33.3 million. And they attribute this not to better containment of the virus but instead to better methods of gathering data.

You can read more about this at The Economist.

or by taking a look at the UN Report Press Release.

So this is good news, in a weird way. Not good news that we've had bad information the last few years. But good news that we're figuring out better ways to research and good news that ultimately fewer people have AIDS, need treated, or can spread it to others.

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