Select Committee on International Development Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100 - 101)

THURSDAY 8 JUNE 2000

DR JULIAN LOB-LEVYT, MR BOB GROSE, MR PAUL ACKROYD AND MS JOANNA GRAHAM

Ms King

  100. Could you give some idea of what those prevalence rates would be amongst the at risk groups?
  (Mr Grose) I could not pull one off the top of my head specifically for Bangladesh. I can compare it, let us say with somewhere like Cambodia, which is higher and there amongst those high risk behaviour groups it is now up around 30 or 40 per cent. I suspect it is lower in Bangladesh.
  (Mr Ackroyd) May I put it in context? There are about 50 million in Bangladesh probably, something like that, so a one per cent incidence is going to be a large number of people. We certainly hope it is nothing like that level and if it were at that level we should be seeing much more indication of it. Although the figures may be understated because the surveillance systems are not good—

Mr Robathan

  101. The data down here is not one per cent, it is 0.03 per cent and I just think that we are in danger of stumbling in the dark if we are not able to appreciate the data. It is my opinion that in sub-Saharan Africa this is much, much the most important issue for sub-Saharan Africa, leave aside war and any other development issues. Would you agree?
  (Dr Lob-Levyt) Yes, I would agree with you.

  Chairman: That is a very suitable answer to finish on. May I thank you for drawing up this document which obviously took a lot of time and effort and I am glad you found it helpful to your work in itself. I should like to thank you for that very hard work and thank you very much for helping us to understand this extremely difficult and tragic epidemic. Thank you very much indeed.






 
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