India, which has been repeatedly accused of denying the size of its AIDS epidemic, probably has victims fewer by millions than widely believed, according to a new but still unreleased household survey.The survey was carried out under international supervision with American financing. If it is correct, India is no longer the world’s supposed leader — with 5.7 million people infected with the virus, according to the official UN 2006 estimate — but is again behind South Africa, which is believed to have more accurate survey results and has an estimated 5.5 million cases, and possibly other countries as well. Early analysis of the figures suggests that India really has between 2 million and 3 million victims, according to several sources, including American epidemiologists who know the data and the Union Health Ministry here. How the rates are calculated has been a subject of debate, with some experts contending that the rates in many places may be exaggerated. “Everyone transiting through here says, ‘This is a pandemic’,” Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said. “But I’m very confident that we will not turn into a generalised epidemic.”The lower figure for India would imply that India has managed to keep its epidemic more like that of the US, within high-risk groups. In India’s case, these are prostitutes and their clients, especially truckers; men who have sex with men; and people who inject drugs.That is exactly what some ex perts on AIDS surveillance techniques have been arguing for years, saying that Indians do not have the same kind of sexual networks that are common in southern and eastern Africa, in which both men and women often have two or more occasional but regular sexual partners over long periods of time. Also, outside of prostitution, “transactional sex” between teenage girls and older men in return for money, food, or clothes is much less common in Asia than in Africa.
