India says AIDS cases far lower, but vows to up HIV fight

India said Friday the number of its people living with HIV-AIDS stands at two million to 3.1 million, sharply lower than earlier estimates, but vowed to spend billions to check a wider epidemic.

Previous estimates from India's National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) had put the HIV caseload at 5.2 million, while UNAIDS in 2006 estimated 5.7 million cases.

"Today we have a far more reliable estimate of the burden of HIV in India," Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said at a news conference in the Indian capital, New Delhi.

"The results show that there are an estimated two million to 3.1 million people affected with HIV-AIDS," he said, adding the tightest estimate was 2.47 million -- a figure also backed by UNAIDS.

International health organisations have for years worried about the possibility of a South Africa-style AIDS epidemic in India, but the new figures being mentioned would suggest a fairly low infection rate of 0.36 percent.

The infection rate was earlier presumed to be 0.9 percent.

International AIDS experts have said the much lower estimate could be attributed to the fact that more data was available this year, including from 100,000 adults tested randomly for HIV as part of a national health survey.

"In this new estimate both information from the national survey and from the sentinel surveys has been used," said Peter Ghys, the head of monitoring for UNAIDS.

Ghys was referring to testing sites where samples are taken from members of both low- and high-risk groups, to be used as markers. More than 1,100 were used this year compared to 700 earlier.

The figure also included information from a behavioural and testing study of 25,000 people from high-risk groups, funded by Avahan, the AIDS arm of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

"It was the largest sample of high-risk groups," Avahan's head, Ashok Alexander, told AFP earlier. "That's a very important thing when you have a 'concentrated' epidemic."

In India, the disease is much more prevalent among high-risk groups like sex workers and men who have sex with men -- a term for both gay men and those who, like married truck drivers, only occasionally have same-sex intercourse.

The disease also looks more alarming when broken down geographically, said Alexander, with states in the south and northeast more severely affected.

"The aggregate number is masking two epidemics," he said, warning that the lower overall number should not lead India to lower its guard.

An epidemiologist who works with India on its AIDS figures agreed.

"The absolute number of new infections occurring in India is still very big," said Prabhat Jha, the head of the Canada-based Centre for Global Health Research, estimating these at between 300,000 to 500,000 a year.

"Will you ever mount a treatment program for everyone? No. So you have to prevent new infections."

Indian officials point to states that were late to join prevention efforts as a sign of what could happen were the country to pull back on its AIDS program.

Southern Andhra Pradesh woke up to the seriousness of the epidemic late and now has almost 20 percent of the country's AIDS cases with less than five percent of India's population.

"When they should have taken action, they didn't," said India's top AIDS official Sujatha Rao.

Despite the good news on infection estimates, India did vow to ramp up its AIDS programmes and spend close to three billion dollars over the next five years, most of it on prevention awareness and condom use.

"In India there about 600 million youth below the age of 25. So first we have to save them," said Ramadoss.