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Africa isn’t dying of Aids
The headline figures are horrible: almost 30 million Africans have HIV/Aids. But, says Rian Malan, the figures are computer-generated estimates and they appear grotesquely exaggerated when set against population statistics

...It was an article from The Spectator describing the bizarre sex practices that contribute to HIV’s rampage across the continent. ‘One in five of us here in Zambia is HIV positive,’ said the report. ‘In 1993 our neighbour Botswana had an estimated population of 1.4 million. Today that figure is under a million and heading downwards. Doom merchants predict that Botswana may soon become the first nation in modern times literally to die out. This is Aids in Africa.’

Really? Botswana has just concluded a census that shows population growing at about 2.7 per cent a year, in spite of what is usually described as the worst Aids problem on the planet. Total population has risen to 1.7 million in just a decade. If anything, Botswana is experiencing a minor population explosion.

There is similar bad news for the doomsayers in Tanzania’s new census, which shows population growing at 2.9 per cent a year. Professional pessimists will be particularly discomforted by developments in the swamplands west of Lake Victoria, where HIV first emerged, and where the depopulated villages of popular mythology are supposedly located. Here, in the district of Kagera, population grew at 2.7 per cent a year before 1988, only to accelerate to 3.1 per cent even as the Aids epidemic was supposedly peaking. Uganda’s latest census tells a broadly similar story, as does South Africa’s.

Some might think it good news that the impact of Aids is less devastating than most laymen imagine, but they are wrong. In Africa, the only good news about Aids is bad news, and anyone who tells you otherwise is branded a moral leper, bent on sowing confusion and derailing 100,000 worthy fundraising drives....

...When you read that 29.4 million Africans are ‘living with HIV/Aids’, it doesn’t mean that millions of living people have been tested. It means that modellers assume that 29.4 million Africans are linked via enormously complicated mathematical and sexual networks to one of those women who tested HIV positive in those annual pregnancy-clinic surveys. Modellers are the first to admit that this exercise is subject to uncertainties and large margins of error. Larger than expected, in some cases.

A year or so back, modellers produced estimates that portrayed South African universities as crucibles of rampant HIV infection, with one in four undergraduates doomed to die within ten years. Prevalence shifted according to racial composition and region, with Kwazulu-Natal institutions worst affected and Rand Afrikaans University (still 70 per cent white) coming in at 9.5 per cent. Real-life tests on a random sample of 1,188 RAU students rendered a startlingly different conclusion: on-campus prevalence was 1.1 per cent, barely a ninth of the modelled figure. ‘Doubt is cast on present estimates,’ said the RAU report, ‘and further research is strongly advocated.’

A similar anomaly emerged when South Africa’s major banks ran HIV tests on 29,000 staff earlier this year. A modelling exercise put HIV prevalence as high as 12 per cent; real-life tests produced a figure closer to 3 per cent. ...

...In Grahamstown, district surgeon Dr Stuart Dyer is contemplating an equally perplexing dearth of HIV cases in the local jail. ‘Sexually transmitted diseases are common in the prison where I work,’ he wrote to the Lancet, ‘and all prisoners who have any such disease are tested for HIV. Prisoners with any other illnesses that do not resolve rapidly (within one to two weeks) are also tested for HIV. As a result, a large number of HIV tests are done every week. This prison, which holds 550 inmates and is always full or overfull, has an HIV infection rate of 2 to 4 per cent and has had only two deaths from Aids in the seven years I have been working there.’ Dyer goes on to express a dim view of statistics that give the impression that ‘the whole of South Africa will be depopulated within 24 months’, and concludes by stating, ‘HIV infection in SA prisons is currently 2.3 per cent.’ According to the newspapers, it should be closer to 60 per cent. ...