UNAIDS Chief Defends Uganda On AIDS Story

Jul 09, 2002

THE Executive Director of the Joint United Nations programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), Dr. Peter Piot, has refuted claims by a British scholar that Uganda’s success story on HIV/AIDS was false.

By Charles Wendo in BarcelonaTHE Executive Director of the Joint United Nations programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), Dr. Peter Piot, has refuted claims by a British scholar that Uganda’s success story on HIV/AIDS was false.Justin Parkhurst of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine claims that Uganda’s HIV/AIDS figures were doctored, misinterpreted and misused. His opinion article based on a PhD research he did in Uganda, was on Saturday published in the Lancet, a weekly medical journal based in London.But in an interview with The New Vision on Sunday, Piot said “This is a total misrepresentation of the facts. It is not true what he is saying. We have refuted it.”Consequently UNAIDS has issued a statement saying there was convincing evidence of a real decline in Uganda´s HIV infection rates and that Parkhurst got his facts and arguments wrong.The UNAIDS statement said figures from different sources including antenatal, community-based surveys and voluntary testing centres show clearly that the infection rate was declining. It adds that there is a broad consensus from the African Network of Epidemiologists (doctors who study the behaviour and trends of disease)that Uganda’s infection rates are indeed declining.In the same issue in which Parkhurst attacked Uganda's success story, The Lancet gave more prominence to an article describing further evidence of declining HIV infections in Rakai. The study was done by a team of independent researchers based in Rakai.A UNAIDS report released last week said the prevalence of HIV in Uganda’s adult population had declined from 8.3% at the end of 1999 to 5.0% at the end of 2001.Ends

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