Reading for 10/21

I found the reading for this week interesting in the sense that it highlights the difficulty of making a direct conclusion from a set of collected data. For instance, the report starts out by mentioning that even in Uganda, there are controversies surrounding whether the decline in HIV prevalence was directly correlated with behavioral change because of the representativeness of data from pregnant women attending antenatal clinics, saturation of infection and mortality within high risk groups, and paucity of data linking the decline in HIV prevalence to the adoption of safer sexual behaviors. These possibilities could undermine the connection between a decline in HIV prevalence and change in sexual behaviors that we have based most of our policies to reduce the amount of HIV incidence for the past few years. In many studies, perhaps especially with HIV, there are always various doubts surrounding the conclusion drawn from the data collected and the accuracy of the data itself, for example whether the sampled group is representative of the population itself. This article is interesting in that it takes another set of data from Zimbabwe that shows a direct correlation between a change in risky sexual behavior and a decline in HIV incidence to demonstrate that there is indeed a correlation. Hence, from the data in Zimbabwe, we can conclude that there is actually a relationship between the two and that our current health policies do not need to be revised. At the same time, instead of directly confronting the controversies surrounding the data collected from Uganda, Simon Gregson uses data collected from Zimbabwe to show that there is indeed a connection between HIV incidence and behavioral change. Therefore, the controversies surrounding the Uganda studies are trivial in that the conclusions drawn from the Uganda studies are accurate even though the studies may not have been perfectly designed to study and draw a conclusion from HIV prevalence in Uganda. I found this approach to the controversies very intriguing.