Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Climate Change Forum Glacier was 49ft Thick, now 10ft Thick

My ex-wife threw out most of my travel photos and slides in 1993,

According to them, it's all a big fairy tale concocted by the United States to suppress poor Africans. Even here, in this Forum, we see people who deny, despite overwhelming evidence, that Global Warming could be caused by Human activity. How do you reach these people?

Denying something is happening does not make it go away, in fact the problem will just get bigger. It seems to me to be obvious that something odd is happpening to the climate world wide. Why this is so seems to have less urgency than what, if anything, we can do about it.

These stories all originate in Africa, but the statistics that support them emanate from the suburbs of Geneva, where the World Health Organization has its headquarters. Technically employed by the United Nations, WHO officials are the world's disease police, dedicated to eradicating illness. They crusade against old scourges, raise the alarm against new ones, fight epidemics, and dispense grants and expertise to poor countries. In conjunction with UNAIDS (the joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, based at the same Geneva campus), the WHO also collects and disseminates information about the AIDS pandemic.

In the West, the collection of such data is a fairly simple matter: Almost every new AIDS case is scientifically verified and reported to government health authorities, who inform the disease police in Geneva. But AIDS mostly occurs in Africa, where hospitals are thinly spread, understaffed and often bereft of the laboratory equipment necessary to confirm HIV infections. How do you track an epidemic under these conditions? In 1985, the WHO asked experts to hammer out a simple description of AIDS, something that would enable bush doctors to recognize the symptoms and start counting cases, but the outcome was a fiasco - partly because doctors struggled to diagnose the disease with the naked eye, but mostly because African governments were too disorganized to collect the numbers and send them in. Once it become clear that the case-reporting system wasn't working, the WHO devised an alternative, by which Africa's AIDS statistics are now primarily based.

It works like this: On any given morning anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, you'll find crowds of expectant mothers ling up outside government prenatal clinics, waiting for a routine checkup that includes the drawing of a blood sample to test for syphilis. According UNAIDS, "anonymous blood specimens left over from these tests are tested for antibodies to HIV," a ritual that usually takes place once a year. The results are fed into a computer model that uses "simple back-calculation procedures" and knowledge of "the well-known natural course of HIV infection" to produce statistics for the continent In other words, AIDS researchers descend on selected clinics, remove the leftover blood samples and screen them for traces of HIV The results are forwarded to Geneva and fed into a computer program called Epi-model: If a given number of pregnant women are HIV-positive, the formula says, then a certain percentage of all adults and children are presumed to be infected, too. And if that many people are infected, it follows that a percentage of them must have died. Hence, when UNAIDS announces 14 million Africans have succumbed to AIDS, it does not mean 14 million infected bodies have been counted. It means that 14 million people have theoretically died, some of them unseen in Africa's swamps, shantytowns and vast swaths of terra incognita.

You can theorize at will about the rest of Africa and nobody will ever be the wiser, but my homeland is different - we are a semi-industrialized nation with a respectable statistical service. "South Africa," says Ian Timaeus, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine professor and UNAIDS consultant "is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa where sufficient deaths are routinely registered to attempt to produce national estimates of mortality from this source." He adds that, "coverage is far from complete," but there's enough of it to be useful - around eight of ten deaths are routinely registered in South Africa, according to Timaeus, compared to about 1 in 100 elsewhere below the Sahara.

It therefore seemed to me that checking the number of registered deaths in South Africa was the surest way of assessing the statistics from Geneva, so I dug out the figures. Geneva's computer models suggested that AIDS deaths here had tripled in three years, surging from 80,000-odd in 1996 to 250,000 in 1999. But no such rise was discernable in total registered deaths, which went from 294,703 to 343,535 within roughly the same period. The discrepancy was so large that I wrote to make absolutely sure I had understood these numbers correctly. Both parties confirmed that I had, and at that exact moment, my story was in trouble. Geneva's figures reflected catastrophe. Pretoria's figures did not. Between these extremes lay a gray area populated by local experts such as Stephen Kramer, manager of insurance giant Metropolitan's AIDS Research Unit, whose own computer model shows AIDS deaths at about one-third Geneva's estimates. But so what? South African actuaries don't get a say in this debate. The figures you see in your newspapers come from Geneva. The WHO takes pains to label these numbers estimates only, not rock-solid certainties, but still, these are estimates we all accept as the truth.

An article like this really doesn't have much of an impact as compared to seeing and smelling Death on that kind of scale.