a response to rian malan’s ‘last ever aids piece’
I should be very happy if Rian Malan’s so-called “last ever Aids piece” (nose88) is truly his last, since he shows no sign of changing his habit of serious errors of logic and deliberate distortions when writing on Aids.
His disingenuous suggestion that the shocking rise in in the number of registered deaths is merely the result of improved death registration and therefore nothing to worry about, is based on misinterpretations and what can be none other than deliberate distortion of the data.
Malan suggests that the increases in registered deaths are primarily the result of improved registration and not the HIV epidemic. However, there are two glaring features of the data that he fails to account for. First, the age-distribution of registered deaths is completely contrary to the distribution in any normal country: in South Africa, adult deaths are concentrated in the population of working and sexually active age, whereas in countries without a devastating Aids epidemic, adult deaths are concentrated among older people. This is shown very clearly, and disturbingly, by the graph below of deaths by age in 2003 derived from Stats SA. How could Malan account for this distribution other than by a devastating HIV epidemic? (Incidentally, I use 2003 rather than 2004, because recorded deaths in the latest year for which Stats SA reports are often not all accounted for.)
Read the rest of this article here. Originally published on aidstruth.org.
