HIV/AIDS: India Slashes Estimate of HIV-Infected People

Contrary to previous estimates, India does not have more HIV-infected people than any country in the world, says a new analysis by government health officials. Improved and widened surveys of the country's massive population has led India's National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) to slash by more than half the estimated number of people infected, from 5.7 million to 2.5 million. NACO, which announced the new figures on 6 July, says HIV thus infects 0.36% of the country's adults, rather than 0.9%. “The figures are now much more realistic,” says N. K. Ganguly, the head of the Indian Council of Medical Research in New Delhi who chaired a meeting that reviewed the new NACO numbers. Ganguly, who long worried that epidemiologists had exaggerated the scale of India's epidemic, adds that he was “very happy” that a look back analysis also found that HIV was not gaining ground in this huge country.