WS More or Less: HIV in Africa
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2016
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The news aggregation website Zimbabwe Today recently ran a headline stating that 74% of African girls aged 15-24 are HIV positive. Although the statistic is not true, Mary Mahy from UNAIDS reveals that young women do have a higher infection rate than young men. Kyle Evans is a folk singing mathematician by trade who is always looking for new ways to communicate his love of maths to a sometimes apprehensive audience. Next week he is representing the UK against 26 other countries at the Cheltenham Science festival in England. He came into the studio to perform his competition entry.
Producer: Laura Gray Presenter: Ruth Alexander
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:05.0 | Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:09.0 | I'm Ruth Alexander. |
| 0:10.0 | On this week's program, we treat you to a maths love song. But first the |
| 0:15.6 | African news website Zimbabwe today recently published an article with this |
| 0:19.8 | startling headline. 74% of African girls age 15 to 24 are HIV positive. |
| 0:27.7 | A shocking statistic, but is it right? |
| 0:31.0 | Elizabeth Kassen's been looking at this for us. Elizabeth, I'm guessing this is wrong, but take me through this one step at a time. |
| 0:38.0 | Well, the first question is, can we get the data on an illness that is surrounded by so much stigma? |
| 0:44.2 | So I spoke to Mary May from UN AIDS, the joint United Nations programme on HIV. |
| 0:50.1 | They help countries across the world collect data on the illness. |
| 0:53.6 | In Africa we primarily rely on kind of three key sources. |
| 0:58.4 | That is data that's coming from a health service that's provided. |
| 1:02.2 | So if you think about a pregnant woman's going into a clinic, |
| 1:05.9 | they will test that woman for HIV. |
| 1:08.0 | And so there's some data that we have. |
| 1:10.3 | In addition, we have household surveys, |
| 1:12.2 | and those are surveys that go to a representative, |
| 1:14.7 | a selection of households, and actually we'll do a finger prick or do some other method to actually |
| 1:19.5 | take a biological specimen to test for HIV. We then at UN AIDS support countries. We help |
| 1:26.4 | countries actually put those data into a model which they will then use to |
| 1:32.1 | estimate the number of new infections |
... |
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