Introduction

This section provides information, updates, and corrections for The AIDS Pandemic: the collision of epidemiology with political correctness (Radcliffe-Oxford, 2007), and responds to questions, reviews, and critiques of this book.

At the outset, I, (James [Jim] Chin) want to make it perfectly clear that I believe that the AIDS pandemic is the most severe and catastrophic infectious disease pandemic in the modern era and I agree with UNAIDS that there are insufficient global resources committed to providing anti-HIV treatment for all who may need such treatment. However, the impact of the AIDS pandemic has been and will continue to be very uneven. My major disagreements with UNAIDS are:

1. UNAIDS has systematically overestimated or has accepted overestimates of HIV prevalence in most countries throughout the world;
2. UNAIDS continues to exaggerate the potential for epidemic HIV transmission in most “general” populations and
3. UNAIDS continues to maintain that the AIDS pandemic is ever increasing and expanding even after it was forced in May 2006 to acknowledge that annual global HIV incidence (new infections) probably peaked by the late 1990s!

I seriously doubt that anyone at UNAIDS has (as of May 2007) bothered to purchase or to read my book, but if they actually did, I would welcome any question or challenge to any number or sentence/paragraph in my book.

Background and Overview

I have had a unique opportunity to study the epidemiology of HIV from the initial investigations in the early 1980s in California to the Global Programme on AIDS (GPA) at the World Health Organization (WHO). At GPA/WHO (from 1987-1992) I was responsible for developing the methodology and guidelines for global and regional surveillance of HIV infections and AIDS cases (HIV/AIDS).

During my public health career that began in the early 1960s, I have always been considered a part of conventional or mainstream medical science. However, since the mid-1990s, I have found myself swimming upstream against mainstream AIDS organizations. I have, during this period, gradually come to the realization that AIDS programs developed by international agencies and faith based organizations have been and continue to be more socially, politically, and moralistically correct than epidemiologically accurate. I, therefore felt obligated to write this book to present an objective assessment of the AIDS pandemic that is at marked variance with the prevailing position of UNAIDS and AIDS program activists.

I believe that UNAIDS and other AIDS advocacy organizations have distorted HIV epidemiology in order to perpetuate the myth of the great potential for HIV epidemics to spread into “general” populations. This has been done either unintentionally out of honest ignorance or misunderstanding, or intentionally by deliberate exaggeration.

It has been difficult for me to understand how, over the past decade, mainstream AIDS scientists, including most infectious disease epidemiologists, have virtually all uncritically accepted the many “glorious” myths and misconceptions that UNAIDS and AIDS activists continue to spread. Any criticism of UNAIDS’ HIV prevalence estimates and projections as being too high is immediately labeled as a blatant attack on AIDS programs and an irresponsible denial of the potential infectiousness and severity of the AIDS pandemic.

I hope that my book will, at a minimum, lead to further dialog and a reappraisal of the validity of the prevailing UNAIDS myths and misconceptions and to a better understanding of the most probable past, present, and future of the AIDS pandemic.

Jim Chin
Clinical Professor of Epidemiology
School of Public Health
University of California at Berkeley