India has announced that it will verify United Nations' estimates that it has overtaken South Africa as the country with the highest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world.
UNAIDS, the U.N.'s AIDS prevention agency, said in May that there were about 5.7 million Indians infected at the end of 2005 against South Africa's 5.5 million cases.The Indian government has disputed the figure, saying there were 5.2 million cases by the end of last year - stirring a debate in local media as to whether authorities have been suppressing facts about the severity of the AIDS epidemic in the country.
According to Sujatha Rao, director general of the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO), the discrepancy between the two estimates was due to different methodologies.
"UNAIDS has taken a different methodology, but it has to be validated because the assumptions that UNAIDS took were based on global data and not Indian data so therefore they have come up with a higher estimate," Rao said.
The U.N. had also taken into account all age groups, whereas Indian estimates were based on those between the ages of 15 and 49 years old, she added.
Rao said the government had now set up an independent expert committee to try to apply and validate UNAIDS' methodology and the results would be known at the end of 2006. She said this would show the reality of the HIV/AIDS situation in India.
Rao said it was not fair to say India had the world's largest HIV-infected population as countries such as China, which says it has 650,000 infections, did not have comprehensive surveillance systems in place compared with India.
