Maravi

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At 7:19 PM ,  MrK said...

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF STD & AIDS, Volume 14: Pages 144-147,
March 2003.

Mounting anomalies in the epidemiology of HIV
in Africa: cry the beloved paradigm
Devon D Brewer PhD1, Stuart Brody PhD2, Ernest Drucker PhD3,
David Gisselquist PhD4, Stephen F Minkin BA6, John J Potterat BA5,
Richard B Rothenberg MD MPH7 and François Vachon MD8

(Authors are listed alphabetically)

1University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA, 2Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology, University of Tübingen, Germany, 3Department of Epidemiology and Social Medicine, Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York City, USA, 4Hershey, PA, USA, 5Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA, 6Network for Infection Prevention, Brattleboro, Vermont 05302, USA, 7 Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, USA, 8University of Paris 7, France

Keywords: HIV, Africa, risk factors, epidemiology, heterosexual transmission, medical transmission

Introduction
There is substantial dissonance between much of the epidemiologic evidence and the current orthodoxy that nearly all of the HIV burden in sub-Saharan Africa can be accounted for by heterosexual transmission and the sexual behaviour of Africans. The mounting toll of HIV infection in Africa is paralleled by a mounting number of anomalies in the many studies seeking to account for it. We propose that existing data can no longer be reconciled with the received wisdom about the exceptional role of sex in the African AIDS epidemic.

Anomalies in sub-Saharan Africa

 

At 7:24 PM ,  MrK said...

This is an old blast from the past, when UNICEF performed DHS type survey, as opposed to UNAIDS's ANC survey of pregnant women only. Note how the writer immediately tries to extoll the effectiveness of HIV prevention programmes, instead of properly crediting the use of a new type of survey for these very different results. - MrK

UNICEF DHS IN SWAZILAND

MBABANE, 27 August (PLUSNEWS) - A dramatically lower number of Swazi teenage girls are being infected by HIV than was previously estimated, suggesting a turning point in the battle against HIV/AIDS in a country with the world's highest HIV infection rates.

The findings in the report, 'A Baseline Study on HIV Risk Factors', commissioned by the UN Childrens' Fund (UNICEF) are derived from interviews and blood tests of over 1,000 Swazis in two rural areas and revealed that only six percent of girls aged from 15 to 19 were found to be HIV-positive, with most of the HIV infections occurring among older girls.

"This is the first time we have had data from a scientifically accurate survey of randomly selected households. It confirms some trends we had suspected, but which were belied by previous HIV estimates," said Dr Alan Brody, country representative for UNICEF.

"This is different from anything that has been seen before. The conventional wisdom is that many more girls were infected," he told PlusNews.

The study was prompted by the results of the government's 2002 sero-surveillance study, which estimated that 32.5 percent of teenage girls between the ages of 15 and 19 were HIV-positive.

 

At 8:39 PM ,  MrK said...

WHOSE ANTIBODIES ARE THEY ANYWAY?
Factors Known to Cause False Positive HIV Antibody Test Results
By Christine Johnson

Continuum Sept./Oct. 1996

 

At 8:58 PM ,  MrK said...

Pregnancy and False Positive HIV Antibody Tests

Apparently, pregnancy and previous pregnancy generate cross-reacting proteins. These cross-react with the protein called P24 that the screening test ELISA/EIA looks for.

The problem is that UNAIDS for years has depended on surveys of the leftoveer blood of pregnant women, collected from pregnancy or antenatal clinics. These surveys are based around a single ELISA test - sometimes two.

This is where these massive national HIV infection numbers in Africa come from. Something to consider.

From The Body:

From dr. Robert J. Frascino, MD on The Body:

1. No, there is nothing wrong with you or the women in your family. It's primarily a limitation of the testing assay that picks up cross-reacting proteins that can occur in women who are or who have been pregnant. These cross-reacting proteins cause the HIV-antibody test to read positive or indeterminate (in the case of some Western Blots), even though the person is HIV negative. That's why we call it a "false-positive". Other tests can easily and definitively differentiate a true- from a false-positive (see below).

http://www.thebody.com/Forums/AIDS/SafeSex/Archive/Pregnancy/Q177389.html

 

At 2:25 AM ,  MrK said...

Apparently, a growing population is not a sign of an absence of a massive HIV/AIDS epidemic, but a sign that 'more needs to be done' to fight HIV/AIDS. Even though 30% of Ugandans were supposed to be HIV positive in the 1990s, the country has had a consistent population growth rate of 3% and over. Which are mutually exclusive facts.

Uganda: 'Population Pressure Affecting Aids Fight'
New Vision (Kampala)
29 April 2008
Posted to the web 30 April 2008
Anne Mugisa
Kampala

UGANDA'S rapid population growth is making it hard for the country to effectively fight the spread of HIV/AIDS, according to the AIDS commission.

The director general, Dr. Kihumuro Apuuli, yesterday explained that mother-to-child transmission accounted for 22% of new infections. He said 25% of the babies born to HIV-infected mothers contracted the virus.

"If we do not prevent new infections, we will be chasing a mirage."

Uganda population is estimated at about 30 million and the women on average bear seven children.

Kihumuro was briefing journalists on the forthcoming HIV/AIDS global implementers meeting slated for June 3-7, in Kampala.

He was flanked by the deputy Chief of Mission at the US embassy, Andrew Chritton and the UNICEF country representative, Keith Mckenzie.

"An estimated 1.1 million people are infected with HIV but 90% of them do not know that they are infected," Kihumuro said.

He lamented the recklessness among people expecting that a drug to treat AIDS would soon be found in addition to the anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs).

The AIDS commission, he noted, had drawn a five-year strategic plan emphasising prevention as opposed to treatment, adding that more that 30,000 new infections were occurring in the country annually.

Kihumuro said HIV-related deaths had risen to 100,000 last year from 72,000 a few years ago when the national sero-prevalence survey was conducted and this showed a 30% increase.

There was need to increase the number of people on anti-retroviral therapy, he observed.

"There are 120,000 people on anti-retroviral drugs out of an estimated 240,000 who need it. We intend make the drugs available to 300,000 people. "

 

At 11:27 PM ,  MrK said...

I have been saying this for over 10 years now. They were wrong about the worldwide heterosexual epidemic of HIV/AIDS, and they are absolutely wrong about any such an epidemic in Africa. UNAIDS should be put in court for fraud, criminal conspiracy and other crimes, for misleading the world about this so-called epidemic. I repeat, just as there never was evidence of a heterosexual epidemic worldwide, there is no such evidence in Africa,the last refuge of the farmaceutical lobby. -MrK


Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits

A 25-year health campaign was misplaced outside the continent of Africa. But the disease still kills more than all wars and conflicts

By Jeremy Laurance
Sunday, 8 June 2008

A quarter of a century after the outbreak of Aids, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has accepted that the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic has disappeared.


In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head of the WHO's department of HIV/Aids said there will be no generalised epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside Africa.

Dr De Cock, an epidemiologist who has spent much of his career leading the battle against the disease, said understanding of the threat posed by the virus had changed. Whereas once it was seen as a risk to populations everywhere, it was now recognised that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients.

Dr De Cock said: "It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in other countries. Ten years ago a lot of people were saying there would be a generalised epidemic in Asia – China was the big worry with its huge population. That doesn't look likely. But we have to be careful. As an epidemiologist it is better to describe what we can measure. There could be small outbreaks in some areas."

In 2006, the Global Fund for HIV, Malaria and Tuberculosis, which provides 20 per cent of all funding for Aids, warned that Russia was on the cusp of a catastrophe. An estimated 1 per cent of the population was infected, mainly through injecting drug use, the same level of infection as in South Africa in 1991 where the prevalence of the infection has since risen to 25 per cent.

Dr De Cock said: "I think it is unlikely there will be extensive heterosexual spread in Russia. But clearly there will be some spread."

Aids still kills more adults than all wars and conflicts combined, and is vastly bigger than current efforts to address it. A joint WHO/UN Aids report published this month showed that nearly three million people are now receiving anti-retroviral drugs in the developing world, but this is less than a third of the estimated 9.7 million people who need them. In all there were 33 million people living with HIV in 2007, 2.5 million people became newly infected and 2.1 million died of Aids.

Aids organisations, including the WHO, UN Aids and the Global Fund, have come under attack for inflating estimates of the number of people infected, diverting funds from other health needs such as malaria, spending it on the wrong measures such as abstinence programmes rather than condoms, and failing to build up health systems.

Dr De Cock labelled these the "four malignant arguments" undermining support for the global campaign against Aids, which still faced formidable challenges, despite the receding threat of a generalised epidemic beyond Africa.

Any revision of the threat was liable to be seized on by those who rejected HIV as the cause of the disease, or who used the disease as a weapon to stigmatise high risk groups, he said.

"Aids still remains the leading infectious disease challenge in public health. It is an acute infection but a chronic disease. It is for the very, very long haul. People are backing off, saying it is taking care of itself. It is not."

Critics of the global Aids strategy complain that vast sums are being spent educating people about the disease who are not at risk, when a far bigger impact could be achieved by targeting high-risk groups and focusing on interventions known to work, such as circumcision, which cuts the risk of infection by 60 per cent, and reducing the number of sexual partners.

There were "elements of truth" in the criticism, Dr De Cock said. "You will not do much about Aids in London by spending the funds in schools. You need to go where transmission is occurring. It is true that countries have not always been good at that."

But he rejected an argument put in The New York Times that only $30m (£15m) had been spent on safe water projects, far less than on Aids, despite knowledge of the risks that contaminated water pose.

"It sounds a good argument. But where is the scandal? That less than a third of Aids patients are being treated – or that we have never resolved the safe water scandal?"

One of the danger areas for the Aids strategy was among men who had sex with men. He said: " We face a bit of a crisis [in this area]. In the industrialised world transmission of HIV among men who have sex with men is not declining and in some places has increased.

"In the developing world, it has been neglected. We have only recently started looking for it and when we look, we find it. And when we examine HIV rates we find they are high.

"It is astonishing how badly we have done with men who have sex with men. It is something that is going to have to be discussed much more rigorously."

The biggest puzzle was what had caused heterosexual spread of the disease in sub-Saharan Africa – with infection rates exceeding 40 per cent of adults in Swaziland, the worst-affected country – but nowhere else.

"It is the question we are asked most often – why is the situation so bad in sub-Saharan Africa? It is a combination of factors – more commercial sex workers, more ulcerative sexually transmitted diseases, a young population and concurrent sexual partnerships."

"Sexual behaviour is obviously important but it doesn't seem to explain [all] the differences between populations. Even if the total number of sexual partners [in sub-Saharan Africa] is no greater than in the UK, there seems to be a higher frequency of overlapping sexual partnerships creating sexual networks that, from an epidemiological point of view, are more efficient at spreading infection."

Low rates of circumcision, which is protective, and high rates of genital herpes, which causes ulcers on the genitals through which the virus can enter the body, also contributed to Africa's heterosexual epidemic.

But the factors driving HIV were still not fully understood, he said.

"The impact of HIV is so heterogeneous. In the US , the rate of infection among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in North Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. That is in one country. How do you explain such differences?"

 

At 4:51 AM ,  MrK said...

AIDS Is Over - from Fintan Dunne

Or download the file here.

 

At 11:51 PM ,  MrK said...

- Why did it take so long for UNAIDS, the UN's official AIDS watch dog and advocacy body, to give up on using these antenatal clinic surveys (ANCs), for representative surveys (called DHS or Demographic and Health Surveys)?

I have an answer for that question now - they (UNAIDS) were making a conscious effort to pump up the perception of the level of HIV infection in African countries.

Read: The Authorities Lied, And I Am Not Glad


Friday 29 August 2008
The authorities have lied, and I am not glad
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, author of 1987’s The Truth About the AIDS Panic, says it is a shame that AIDS insiders did not expose the myths and opportunism of the AIDS industry earlier. But still, better late than never.
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick

There is a widely accepted view that Britain was saved from an explosive epidemic of heterosexual AIDS in the late 1980s by a bold campaign initiated by gay activists and radical doctors and subsequently endorsed by the government and the mass media.

[AIDS panic]
Cover illustration by
Jan Bowman

According to advocates of this view, we owe our low rates of HIV infection today largely to the success of initiatives such as the ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ leaflet distributed to 23million households and the scary ‘Tombstones and Icebergs’ television and cinema adverts (though they are always quick to add that we must maintain vigilance and guard against complacency).

Now former AIDS industry insiders are challenging the imminent heterosexual plague story and many of the other scare stories of the international AIDS panic. James Chin, author of The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology with Political Correctness, is a veteran public health epidemiologist who worked in the World Health Organisation’s Global Programme on AIDS in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Elizabeth Pisani, a journalist turned epidemiologist and author of The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS, spent most of the past decade working under the auspices of UNAIDS, which took over the global crusade against HIV in 1996. Once prominent advocates of the familiar doomsday scenarios, both have now turned whistleblowers on their former colleagues in the AIDS bureaucracy, a ‘byzantine’ world, according to Pisani, in which ‘money eclipses truth’.

For Chin, the British AIDS story is an example of a ‘glorious myth’ – a tale that is ‘gloriously or nobly false’, but told ‘for a good cause’. He claims that government and international agencies, and AIDS advocacy organisations, ‘have distorted HIV epidemiology in order to perpetuate the myth of the great potential for HIV epidemics to spread into “general” populations’. In particular, he alleges, HIV/AIDS ‘estimates and projections are “cooked” or made up’.

While Pisani disputes Chin’s claim that UNAIDS epidemiologists deliberately overestimated the epidemic, she admits to what she describes as ‘beating up’ the figures, insisting – unconvincingly – that there is a ‘huge difference’ between ‘making it up (plain old lying) and beating it up’. Pisani freely acknowledges her role in manipulating statistics to maximise their scare value, and breezily dismisses the ‘everyone-is-at-risk nonsense’ of the British ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ campaign.

Chin’s book offers a comprehensive exposure of the hollowness of the claims of the AIDS bureaucracy for the efficacy of their preventive campaigns. He provides numerous examples of how exaggerated claims for the scale of the HIV epidemic (and the risks of wider spread) in different countries and contexts enable authorities to claim the credit for subsequently lower figures, as they ‘ride to glory’ on curves showing declining incidence. As he argues, ‘HIV prevalence is low in most populations throughout the world and can be expected to remain low, not because of effective HIV prevention programmes, but because… the vast majority of the world’s populations do not have sufficient HIV risk behaviours to sustain epidemic HIV transmission’.

By the late 1980s, it was already clear that, given the very low prevalence of HIV, the difficulty of transmitting HIV through heterosexual sex and the stable character of sexual relationships (even those having multiple partners tend to favour serial monogamy), an explosive HIV epidemic in Britain, of the sort that occurred in relatively small networks of gay men and drug users, was highly improbable, as Don Milligan and I argued in 1987 (1).

As both Chin and Pisani indicate, high rates of heterosexually spread HIV infection remain the exceptional feature of sub-Saharan Africa (and parts of the Caribbean) where a particular pattern of concurrent networks of sexual partners together with high rates of other sexually transmitted infections facilitated an AIDS epidemic. Though this has had a devastating impact on many communities, Chin suggests that HIV prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean has been overestimated by about 50 per cent. The good news is that, contrary to the doom-mongering of the AIDS bureaucracy, the rising annual global HIV incidence peaked in the late 1990s and the AIDS pandemic has now passed its peak.

Most significantly, the sub-Saharan pattern has not been replicated in Europe or North America, or even in Asia or Latin America, though there have been localised epidemics associated with gay men, drug users and prostitution, most recently in South-East Asia and Eastern Europe.

Many commentators now acknowledge the gross exaggerations and scaremongering of the AIDS bureaucracy. It is clear that HIV has remained largely confined to people following recognised high-risk behaviours, rather than being, in the mantra of the AIDS bureaucracy, a condition of poverty, gender inequality and under-development. Yet they also accept the argument, characterised by Chin as ‘political correctness’, that it is better to try to terrify the entire population with the spectre of an AIDS epidemic than it is to risk stigmatising the gays and junkies, ladyboys and whores who feature prominently in Pisani’s colourful account.

For Chin and Pisani, the main problem of the mendacity of the AIDS bureaucracy is that it leads to misdirected, ineffective and wasteful campaigns to change the sexual behaviour of the entire population, while the real problems of HIV transmission through high-risk networks are neglected. To deal with these problems, both favour a return to traditional public health methods of containing sexually transmitted infections through aggressive testing, contact tracing and treatment of carriers of HIV. Whereas the gay activists who influenced the early approach of the AIDS bureaucracy favoured anonymous and voluntary testing, our whistleblowers now recommend a more coercive approach, in relation to both diagnosis and treatment.

Pisani reminds readers that ‘public health is inherently a somewhat fascist discipline’ (for example, quarantine restrictions have an inescapably authoritarian character) and enthusiastically endorses the AIDS policies of the Thai military authorities and the Chinese bureaucrats who are not restrained from targeting high-risk groups by democratic niceties. The problem is that, given the climate of fear generated by two decades of the ‘everyone-is-at-risk nonsense’, the policy now recommended by Chin and Pisani is likely to lead to more repressive interventions against stigmatised minorities (which will not help to deter the spread of HIV infection).

Chin confesses that he has found it difficult ‘to understand how, over the past decade, mainstream AIDS scientists, including most infectious disease epidemiologists, have virtually all uncritically accepted the many “glorious” myths and misconceptions UNAIDS and AIDS activists continue to perpetuate’. An explanation for this shocking betrayal of principle can be found in a 1996 commentary on the British AIDS campaign entitled ‘Icebergs and rocks of the “good lie”’. In this article, Guardian journalist Mark Lawson accepted that the public had been misled over the threat of AIDS, but argued that the end of promoting sexual restraint (especially among the young) justified the means (exaggerating the risk of HIV infection): as he put it, ‘the government has lied and I am glad’ (2).

This sort of opportunism is not confined to AIDS: in other areas where experts are broadly in sympathy with government policy – such as passive smoking, obesity and climate change – they have been similarly complicit in the prostitution of science to propaganda.

It is a pity that Chin and Pisani did not blow their whistles earlier and louder, but better late than never.

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick is the author of MMR and Autism: What Parents Need to Know (buy this book from Amazon(UK)) and The Tyranny of Health: Doctors and the Regulation of Lifestyle (buy this book from Amazon(UK)).

The Wisdom of Whores, by Elisabeth Pisani, is published by Granta Books. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology with Political Correctness, by James Chin, is published by Radcliffe Publishing Ltd. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

(1) Michael Fitzpatrick and Don Milligan, The Truth About The Aids Panic, 1987

(2) Mark Lawson, ‘Icebergs and rocks of the “good” lie’, Guardian, 24 June 1996

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/5661/

 

At 10:20 PM ,  MrK said...

(NRC) AIDS: are we being deceived?

AIDS: are we being deceived?
Published: 15 September 2008 10:40 | Changed: 19 September 2008 08:50

We are still being told that Africa suffers a devastating AIDS epidemic. The gigantic numbers of infections yield gigantic amounts of public funds for research and thus researchers. What scientific judgement can we expect from experts who stand for a broad-based conviction that guarantees their income?

 

At 7:14 PM ,  Rahasya said...

There are other candidates for the immune system breaking down, which perhaps is happening.

Maize and soya grown in SA is apparently genetically modified to produce insecticides. The same maize is now cited as the cause of the bee population destruction. It destroys the immune systems of bees.

Considering that the same cartel of corporations produces the GM mielies and the aids dogme, and the aids medications.... well, just perhaps that's something worth consideration.

 

At 8:57 PM ,  MrK said...

Hi Rahasya,

There are indeed other causes for the immune system breaking down - like long term exposure to parasites, bad water and malnutrition.

However, one factor that is often overlooked in the corporate owned media (because remedying it would be expensive), is massive environmental pollution.

Check out the website of the National Environmental Council of Zambia:

http://www.necz.org.zm/

In Zambia, especially the Copper Belt province is heavily polluted. In South Africa, the entire Johannesburg area is heavily polluted by coal fired power stations and home heaters and the mines themselves.

Acid Mines - South Africa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X97CY15vh7w

 

At 9:03 PM ,  MrK said...

PS, I wrote:

(Source: personal correspondence with the US Census Bureau, but the with aids number is available on their website - also note that on this website, they project South Africa's population to decline to 39 million by 2025).

The US Census Bureau now has changed it's population size to match the population given by the Community Household Survey of 2007.

No explanation is given about how the 'with AIDS' population number could have been so far below the actual population of South Africa for all these years.

 

At 6:34 PM ,  MrK said...

On the systematic overestimation (cooking the books) on HIV prevalence in Africa, see:

Estimates on HIV called too high
New data cut rates for many nations
By John Donnelly, Globe Staff
June 20, 2004

How AIDS in Africa Was Overstated
Reliance on Data From Urban Prenatal Clinics Skewed Early Projections
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 6, 2006

 

At 8:17 PM ,  MrK said...

Promiscuity not behind HIV epidemic
ANI27 October 2009, 12:00am IST
Print Email Discuss Bookmark/Share Save Comment Text Size: |

While it is widely believed that promiscuity or overlapping multiple sexual partners are driving the HIV epidemic, Brown University researchers Promiscuity may not be behind HIV epidemic (Getty Images)
have found that there is not much scientific evidence to support the idea .

Thus, they have said that more research is needed to prove that the sexual practice of concurrency has accelerated the spread of HIV in Africa.

"People have just accepted at face value that this is the main thing that’s driving the epidemic. But the evidence that concurrency is a major factor is very weak," said epidemiologist Mark Lurie, assistant professor community health and medicine.

In their argument, Lurie and co-author Samantha Rosenthal have said that there is no conclusive evidence that overlapping multiple sexual partners increases the size of an HIV epidemic, accelerates the speed at which the virus is transmitted or makes HIV more persistent in a given population.

They drew their conclusion by looking at previous studies that examined concurrency in any way. And this, they say, is because HIV epidemics can’t be explained by a single variable-a number of factors are more likely, with some factors more important in some geographic areas than others.

"The studies you need to prove causality don’t exist. None of those studies have been done," said Lurie. While the researchers don’t dispute the notion that concurrent sexual relationships could "theoretically" play a major role driving HIV transmission through networks of people, but to prove this true, a number of research initiative are needed, they said.

And thus they have proposed improved methods for measuring both sexual behaviour and the duration or overlapping of sexual partnerships. Other than that, a common definition of concurrency is also needed.

There is a need for longitudinal studies that measure both concurrency and incidence of HIV infection. Without the added data, Lurie said, there is a risk that public policy-makers, development agencies, and aid organizations are spending too much money on campaigns against taking on overlapping multiple sexual partners when other causes may matter more.

"We are also worried about the unintended consequences of concurrency interventions. If you are giving a message that says ‘Don’t have concurrent partnerships,’ then people can easily take away from that the message to have lots of partnerships as long as they don’t overlap," said Lurie.

The study has been published in an upcoming issue of the journal AIDS and Behaviour.

 

At 5:17 PM ,  MrK said...

On the massive difference in HIV infections in the DRC (1.3%), and Zambia (16% - FRAUD):

(Measure DHS) First-ever Demographic and Health Survey in DRC reveals low HIV prevalence, high fertility
Press Release
Sep 16, 2008

Only one percent of Congolese adults are infected with HIV, reports the first ever Democratic Republic of Congo Demographic and Health Survey. National prevalence is 1.3 percent, while prevalence is almost twice as high among women as among men (1.6 and 0.9 percent, respectively). Men and women living in urban areas are twice as likely to be infected as those in rural areas.

This low prevalence is promising especially when compared to significantly higher rates in neighboring countries, such as Zambia were 16 percent of the adult population is HIV-positive. However, knowledge of HIV prevention among Congolese adults is alarmingly low; only 54 percent of women and 64 percent of men know that they can reduce their risk of infection by using a condom. Additionally, less than half of women know that AIDS cannot be transmitted by mosquitoes.

More...

The EDS-RDC was conducted among 8,886 households, 9,995 women age 15-49, and 4,757 men age 15-59 by the Ministry of Planning. Macro International Inc. provided technical assistance as part of the USAID-funded Demographic and Health Surveys project (MEASURE DHS). Funding for the survey was provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Department for International Development (DFID), UNICEF, the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), the Wold Bank through the Programme National Multisectoriel de Lutte contre le Sida (PNMLS), and the Projet d’Appui à la Réhabilitation du Secteur de la Santé (PARSS).

For more information on the 2007 EDS-RDC, please contact Ministry of Planning 4155, rue des Coteaux Quartier Petit Pont Kinshasa/Gombe (BP 9378 Kin 1); email: minplan@micronet.cd

 

At 5:20 PM ,  MrK said...

However in Zambia "The high number of females tested was mostly from the PMTCT programme which accounted for 364,331." - Fraud.

ZAMBIA COUNTRY REPORT
Monitoring the Declaration of Commitment on HIV and AIDS and the Universal Access
Biennial Report

SUBMITTED TO THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY
SPECIAL SESSION ON AIDS Declaration of Commitment
Reporting period: January 2008 – December 2009
MARCH 31st 2010

3.3.3 Number of individuals aged 15 and over, who received HIV testing and counselling and know their results

At the end of 2008, the number of people aged 15 years and older who received HIV testing and counselling through any method or setting in the past 12 months and know their results was 511,266 of which 80,659 were male while 430,607 were female for the period January to December 200828. The high number of females tested was mostly from the PMTCT programme which accounted for 364,331.

 

At 9:46 AM ,  Chris Spencer said...

I always buy home instant HIV test kits from avoidhiv.com to test myself and my partners.
Lots of people lie and say they are HIV negative when in-fact they are HIV positive, someone even showed me a fake paper from his doctor that looked so real but he was positive, the only way of knowing is to have them do the test in front of you using the instant HIV test kit.

 

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