New Study Boosts Forecasts of AIDS Infection
Up to 110 million of the world’s adults likely will be infected with the AIDS virus by the turn of the century, a prediction nearly three times that of a recent projection by the World Health Organization, according to a new study released Wednesday.
The report, compiled by the Harvard University-based Global AIDS Policy Coalition, warned that the pandemic is “spinning out of control” and said the gap between efforts to combat the disease and the growing number of cases and new infections “is widening rapidly and dangerously.”
The study, prepared by a team of 40 experts and scheduled for release in book form in August, estimated that 38 million to 110 million adults, and more than 10 million children, will become infected with the human immunodeficiency virus by the year 2000.
In February, WHO predicted that up to 40 million adults and children would be infected by that year, a projection that many international AIDS experts have called conservative.
Dr. Jonathan Mann, director of Harvard’s International AIDS Center and chief author of the new study, said his independent organization could operate with greater freedom than WHO, which is beholden to the member countries supporting it.
“We are unburdened by any constraints in terms of pleasing people, satisfying people or responding to people’s assumptions,” said Mann, who served as the director of WHO’s Global AIDS Program from 1987 to 1990.
Dan Epstein, a Washington spokesman for WHO, denied that the U.N.-affiliated health organization is vulnerable to pressure from member nations to keep its estimates conservative. WHO likely has been hampered by underreporting of AIDS cases by member countries, he said, but it factored in this possibility when calculating future predictions. Forecasts by any organization are, at best, “a guessing game,” he said.
Dr. June Osborn, who chairs the National Commission on AIDS and was one of the experts involved in the new study, said the goal of the report is “to try to give some perspective of the actual situation around the globe using a variety of sources so we can be realistic in facing the magnitude of the upcoming problem.”
These, she said, included “all kinds of data sources, certainly those of WHO and those of other national and international agencies to get a realistic projection.”
The new study, which was funded by the Association Francois-Xavier Bagnoud, a Swiss foundation, also predicted that by the year 2000, the largest proportion of HIV infections will be in Asia, surpassing sub-Saharan Africa.
AIDS also is spreading to previously untouched areas of the world, such as Paraguay, Greenland and the Pacific Island nations of Fiji, Papua, New Guinea and Samoa, the report warned.
The Harvard group said that by early this year, 2.6 million people worldwide had developed AIDS and that nearly 13 million were infected with HIV.
WHO has estimated that 9 million to 11 million adults and 1 million children were infected and that about 1.5 million adults and 500,000 children have developed symptoms of the disease.
