Beijing Newspeak

“According to official estimates, there are believed to be 650,000 people living with HIV/AIDS in China.”

A line similar to the one above can be found in practically every story about HIV/AIDS in China, from Xinhua to Reuters, published in the last couple of years. The statistic is courtesy of the Chinese Ministry of Health, the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS, but it seems about time this oft-repeated figure is updated, or at least qualified in some way.

A friend of mine - and in fact one of my many nemeses on the high-flying 50-yuan-a-game Beijing poker circuit - Gabe Suk is the head of a non-profit organisation called Prevention Through Education. PTE works to bring HIV/AIDS education to Chinese classrooms, particularly those of middle school students in their final years of compulsory education. He also blogs a bit to spread the word and this is his recent post on news of a sharp increase in new HIV infections in China. It is well worth reading the whole post as it gives an idea of what PTE is trying to achieve.

It starts like this:

China has reported 18,543 new HIV infections in the first half of 2007, which is near the reported number from all of last year.  A figure that is certainly worrying and indicative of China’s growing epidemic …

And then moves on to provide a realistic estimate for the actual number of new HIV infections:

There is always a large discrepancy between the amount of reported cases and the amount of actual or estimated cases.  This stems from lack of surveillance as well as the fact that worldwide only around 10% of HIV positive people actually know they are positive.  If we take a conservative estimate for China and say that 20% of people who are HIV positive know their status we could estimate that 18,543 reported infections translates to 92,715 actual infections.

The overall situation of HIV/AIDS in China is provided in these two paragraphs that PTE quotes from Reuters:

The nation had 214,300 officially registered cases of HIV/AIDS by late July, Xinhua said, an increase of five percent over the figure for April.

The United Nations estimates the true number of the killer disease in the country to be around 650,000.

There’s that stat again. Back to PTE:

Ah the stats, everyone loves the stats.  I don’t really get it in China.  There is one constant number 650,000, that was adjusted from around 840,000 by the  WHO, but never changes despite around 100,000 new infections every year…  I think what we can learn from all the misleading stats and contradictions in information is that no one really knows for sure.  China is so massive that to constantly rely on such a solid statistic seems a little silly.

I’m inclined to agree although I do confess to harbouring a burning desire for stats (which is just as well as a Xinhua news polisher) especially when PTE’s earlier (conservative) calculation method is applied to the figure of 214,300 - the number of officially registered cases in China. If only 20 percent of Chinese people with HIV know they have the disease then the actual figure has the potential to be more than one million - 1,071,500 to be exact. Time for a recount I think.