Back to Index

Latest Statistics On Aids Misconstrued
Dr Timothy Stamps, Health Advisor in the Office of the President and Cabinet, The Herald
July 26, 2004

http://www.herald.co.zw/index.php?id=34169&pubdate=2004-07-26

Aids is a complex subject, so people may be forgiven if mistakes are made with sometimes complex issues.

Lay journalists, in particular, are likely to misinterpret results, but even those in the field of expert study sometimes get results which are, to say the least, incongruous.

The recent "Zimbabwe National HIV and Aids Estimates 2003" compilation is the latest to be misconstrued.

On Page 19, the caution is made that the survey "does not reflect an actual decline in prevalence".

In fact, the only words in the whole document that are underlined, thus emphasised, are the two words "does not".

Yet the popular media makes an extraordinary claim that the prevalence of Aids in the general population of Zimbabwe has declined "from 33,7 percent in 2001 to 24,6 percent in 2003"!

The only way that that could have happened is that an awful lot of Zimbabweans had to have died of Aids in those two years; in fact, 9,1 percent of the total population of Zimbabwe, i.e. over one million people!

Furthermore, the word "stigma" has been bandied about a lot in recent times. Yet the worst culprits are the Aids organisations and the popular media itself, calling children who have lost one or both parents through Aids "Aids orphans"!

A moment’s thought will, I hope, indicate that these children have been stigmatised because of the actions of a person or persons they have no control over, and worse still, to get any benefit, for example from the Aids fund(s), they have to identify themselves, personally, to people equally remote from their own particular circumstance and their names be published, sometimes for the benefit of a new non-governmental organisation which they have never heard of, and from which NGO they may never receive any personal benefit.

Another aspect I have never understood is the issue related to stigma, of the publication of names of prominent people after they have died of Aids.

Do they have no families or grieving relatives and friends for whom the loss, prematurely, of a member of their own community is not a calamity to be treated delicately? But until they die, their status is supposed to be secret!

Frankly, there is no sense in the current popularisation of Aids for monetary purposes — a condition I have previously referred to as "the Aids industry".

We have to draw the unfortunate conclusion that they are not at all interested in human suffering and only accept it where it can make personal wealth and fame.

Dr Timothy Stamps,
Health Advisor in the Office of the President and Cabinet.

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP