Summary
With the news that a baby has been ‘cured’ of HIV what do the numbers tell us about the epidemic. Ruth Alexander looks at the changes in the way that the disease has been measured. Also the Dow Jones hit an all-time high this week so is it party time for investors?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading from the BBC. |
| 0:03.0 | The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use |
| 0:07.0 | go to BBCWorldService.com slash podcasts. |
| 0:13.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander. |
| 0:18.0 | The news that a baby has been cured of HIV has kind of thinking |
| 0:23.0 | about how the data on HIV cases are gathered. |
| 0:26.0 | The disease has been one of modern medicines greatest challenges since it first appeared |
| 0:31.0 | about 30 years ago. So it seemed encouraging to see that in recent years |
| 0:35.0 | the number of new cases has been falling. |
| 0:38.0 | But there's a lot more uncertainty about these figures than the headlines suggest. |
| 0:42.0 | Wesley Stephenson's been looking at this. |
| 0:44.0 | Yes, according to the Joint United Nations programme on HIV AIDS |
| 0:48.0 | or UN AIDS as it's known, in 2011 there were 34 million people living with HIV, |
| 0:54.0 | at 2.5 million new cases in that year. |
| 0:57.0 | That's 20% fewer new infections than was the case 10 years earlier. |
| 1:02.0 | So you'd think that tells a simple and strong story, |
| 1:05.0 | incident rates of falling, prevention programmes must be working. |
| 1:09.0 | But this might not be the entire story. |
| 1:11.0 | New methods of estimating these figures are being introduced all the time |
| 1:15.0 | in order to improve the accuracy of these figures. |
| 1:17.0 | And sometimes this can have a dramatic effect. |
| 1:20.0 | For example, in 2007, UN AIDS reduced their estimates of the numbers of people |
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