The head of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department has officially admitted for the first time that there will be no global epidemic of the disease among the heterosexual population outside Africa.
Kevin de Cock said global prevention strategies to address AIDS as a risk to all populations, among the WHO and major AIDS organizations, may have been misdirected. It is now recognized that, with the exception of sub-Saharan African, it is confined to high-risk groups.
These groups include men who have sex with other men, drug users who inject with needles, and sex workers and their clients.
Some AIDS organizations, including the WHO, U.N. AIDS and the Global Fund have been blasted for inflating estimates of the number of people infected, taking much-needed funds from other diseases like malaria.
One result of the WHO’s admission may be that the vast sums of money spent on AIDS education for people who are not at risk may now be concentrated on high-risk groups.
[pay attention: the majority of pieces I've seen on this story spin it to be one of 'AIDS rates declining' and 'pandemic over' - and not that they were over reported in the first place, which is the case]
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[FLASHBACK , 5/30/07:
United Nations' AIDS programme under fire
Two new books are forcing the United Nations' AIDS programme to defend itself against claims that politics have distorted its mission. That way, Chin says, the agency can claim credit when actual infection rates are lower than the projections. In one, Berkeley epidemiologist James Chin argues that the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has overestimated the potential size of the AIDS pandemic.
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