How AIDS in Africa Was Overstated

Reliance on Data From Urban Prenatal Clinics Skewed Early Projections

By Craig Timberg

Washington Post Foreign Service

Thursday, April 6, 2006; Page A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/05/AR2006040502517.html

KIGALI, Rwanda -- Researchers said nearly two decades ago that this tiny country was part of an AIDS Belt stretching across the midsection of Africa, a place so infected with a new, incurable disease that, in the hardest-hit places, one in three working-age adults were already doomed to die of it.

But AIDS deaths on the predicted scale never arrived here, government health officials say. A new national study illustrates why: The rate of HIV infection among Rwandans ages 15 to 49 is 3 percent, according to the study, enough to qualify as a major health problem but not nearly the national catastrophe once predicted.

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