Last year I wrote about  how the media often resorts to cliches and convenient stereotypes rather than doing the hard work to get the true story behind sensational headlines.

I was referring to the much-hyped headlines and reports about an AIDS epidemic in India. It now looks almost certain that the numbers may have been overinflated.

The Times quoted Denis Broun, India country director for UNAids as saying, “For the country as a whole, the risk of an Africa-type epidemic is very remote” while the NY Times mentioned in its report that, “…The lower figure for India would imply that India has managed to keep its epidemic more like that of the United States, in that the virus circulates mostly within high-risk groups.”.

The NY Times article also quoted Daniel Halperin, an expert on AIDS infection rates at the Harvard School of Public Health as saying that “…AIDS-fighting agencies had such a stake in portraying the epidemic as an approaching Armageddon that they were hesitant to make revisions…If the total number of cases in the world is half of what you’ve been saying, that’s a bitter pill to swallow…so every year they lower the numbers a little bit, and retroactively change the estimates of what it used to be. It’s sort of Orwellian” (emphasis mine).

Related Post:

AIDS’ first casualty in India: Truth