Here’s why I’m a bit of a skeptic with regard to CDC AIDS stats. Here are two consecutive paragraphs in Lawrence Altman’s report this morning from the AIDS conference in Spain:
Federal officials said they felt confident in reporting that the number of new H.I.V. infections has been stable in recent years, with an estimated 40,000 Americans becoming infected each year. Government officials estimate that 900,000 Americans are living with H.I.V. or AIDS. The number has increased by 50,000 since 1998, largely because advances in treatment have controlled the infection in many people, allowing some to go back to work and live longer.
If 40,000 are infected each year, shouldn’t over 120,000 new infections have been logged since 1998? So why only 50,000? No one at the CDC really answers that question ever. The 40,000 a year is plucked almost out of thin air, and used for funding purposes. (And factoring in deaths doesn’t help either. The total number of deaths for those three years is a decelerating 50,000. That still leaves 20,000 alleged infections unaccounted for.) Imagine the panic among the AIDS lobby if they had to report that the rate of infections were declining! And by the way, here’s the link to the actual JAMA study that shows the emergence of a “super-bug.” The boilerplate announced that “in 1996, only 2.5 percent of those tested were infected by a virus resistant to two different classes of drugs. That number rose to 13 percent by 2000.” How many were in the actual study? 225 people over all, but in the specific studies that gave the results cited by the press, less than 100. The number of people with actual resistant virus to one class of drugs? Twelve people. The number with resistance to protease inhibitors? Seven. And the conclusion of the study: “The frequency of primary resistance to NNRTIs is increasing, although resistance to all available classes of antiretroviral therapy remains rare.” How many stories focused on the fact that such resistance to all drugs is rare?
The Dish 