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Rediff.com  » News » India may be inflating AIDS figures: Study

India may be inflating AIDS figures: Study

December 13, 2006 16:00 IST
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A new British study says methods used to estimate the number of people affected by HIV/Aids in India are flawed and the actual number of cases may be lower, the BBC reported.

The UN estimates that India has the highest number of HIV infections with 5.7 million people with the virus but the British journal BMC Medicine says the number of people with the infection may be only 40 per cent of the official estimate.

The study is based on research in one district in Andhra Pradesh. Investigators collected blood samples from 12,617 people aged between 15 and 49 years in Guntur district - one of the worst affected areas in the state - to come to their conclusions.  The method estimated that there were 45,900 people living with HIV in Guntur, compared to the estimate of 112,600 reached by the official method.

The study believes that there may be between 3.2 million to 3.5 million adults with the infection in India.

However, study investigator Dr Lalit Dandona told the BBC that even though their numbers were smaller, they were by no means suggesting that the problem is already taken care of.

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