HIV stats don't tell story: Docs: Numbers are just a drop in the bucket

Vancouver health authorities dismissed as naive yesterday reports
suggesting the rate of HIV infection in the city is going down.

A mixup in figures from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control put the
number of Vancouverites who tested positive last year for HIV, the
virus which develops into AIDS, at 713.

In fact, that figure is the number for B.C. The number of new cases in
Vancouver was 469 a drop from the 590 testing positive in 1991.

But Dr. John Blatherwick, VancouverRichmond health officer, said
yesterday the Centre for Disease Control numbers which reflect
people who have gone to a lab to be tested were only ever
considered a drop in the bucket. And they weren't the figures on which
the health board made the decision to call a medical emergency.

``I wish that was true,'' said Blatherwick, referring to the report
that numbers have dropped. ``If you just looked at those stats, you'd
say things aren't as bad as they are. They don't represent the real
numbers.''

Blatherwick said the lab numbers do not represent the number of
intravenous drug users who have spread the disease through the
downtown east side.

For that reason, doctors established the Vancouver Injection Drug Use
Study out of St. Paul's Hospital, which surveyed 1,000 needle users.
The initial numbers found 23 per cent of those people were HIV
positive and that in the first few months of 1996, the rate of new
infections was 18.6 per cent.

That rate has since dropped to four per cent, said Blatherwick, but
not because the epidemic does not exist. The absolute numbers went up
meaning there were fewer new people among the 1,000 to infect.

Dr. Martin Schechter, who runs the St. Paul's program, said the
infection rate among people who voluntarily test is somewhat
irrelevant to an epidemic among drug users.

``I think this entire report appears very naive,'' he said. ``It's
very likely that there is a large majority of people who have not been
tested.''

The provincial testing program's statistics also fail to consider the
possibility that fewer people went in for tests last year than in
1991, said Blatherwick.