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  • Title: Nigerians divided on AIDS prevalence. International / case rates.
    Journal: AIDS Wkly; 1994 Oct 10; ():12-3. PubMed ID: 12288417.
    Abstract:
    The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than half a million people in Africa had AIDS in 1993 alone. According to the WHO, another 10 million Africans now carry HIV, including more than half a million in Nigeria. But some Nigerian scientists charge that their counterparts in the industrialized world deliberately inflate the figures to create the impression that Africa is as poor in health as it is economically. On the other hand, some feel AIDS has been killing more people in Nigeria than official reports show. Professor Akande Abdulkarim, a biochemist of the University of Khartoum, Sudan, argued that AIDS is not as pandemic as the Western scientists maintain. Abdulkarim wondered how AIDS, first discovered among homosexual communities in the United States, had suddenly become an African scourge. He added that body slimness as one of the manifestations of AIDS could be deceitful since Africa has about 11 diseases which cause weight loss, including tuberculosis. Since the discovery of AIDS, Nigerian health officials have alerted the nation, quoting very high figures even though not many people go for AIDS screening in the country. The Health and Social Services Minister announced early in 1994 that AIDS prevalence had risen from 300 reported cases in 1992 to 962 in 1993. More than 600,000 Nigerians had tested HIV-positive since 1986, when the disease was first diagnosed in the country. As of December 1993, only 100 Nigerians were officially deemed to have died from AIDS. But another scientist cautioned Nigerians against being deluded by the low AIDS-mortality figure reported; the low death rate was misleading because some deaths have been wrongly attributed to some other ailments.
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