Was Uganda’s AIDS Success a Fraud?
In June 2002 Uganda was hailed for its apparently amazing success at lowering HIV infections. President Yoweri Museveni announced that the rate of HIV infection was down from 30 percent in 1990 to just 6.1 percent in 2001. But this month The Lancet published a report questioning the validity of those claims.
Justin Parkhurst of the London School of Hygeine reported in The Lancet that Uganda used a number of questionable statistical practices to create the appearance that AIDS infections had declined so dramatically.
Among other things, Uganda relied on a small number of reports from urban clinics and then extrapolated from those figures, even though 87 percent of Uganda’s population is rural. Uganda officials also apparently used the rate of prevalence as the rate of infection, even though prevalence rates are subject to fluctuations when people with the disease die.
Parkhurst concluded that, “Statements of success have often been based on misinterpretation of epidemiological data, and can sometimes not be supported when all the Ugandan evidence is assessed . . . Unfounded claims of Ugandan success have persisted in international policy discourse.”
Source:
Uganda: Row over HIV/AIDS success story. Africa Online, August 26, 2002.
The Was Uganda’s AIDS Success a Fraud? by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.