Hi Syn,
Nice to meet you, so to speak.
The following exerpt from Rian Malan's article "AIDS IN AFRICA, In Search of the Truth", Rolling Stone Magazine, 22 Nov. 2001 is from SA not Togo and how closely it parallels the situation there I do not know.
Going by the last comment of this excerpt I would be a little reluctant to accept your local rags as being reliable sources of AIDS statistics.
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.
But you don't want to hear this, do you? Nor did I. It spoiled the plot, so I tried to ignore it. Since it was indeed true that the very large numbers of South Africans were dying, then the nation's coffin makers had to be laboring hard to keep pace with growing demand. One newspaper account I found told of a company called Affordable Coffins, purveyor of cheap cardboard caskets, which had more orders than it could fill. But the firm was barely two months old when the story ran, and two rival entrepreneurs who launched similar products a few years back had gone under. "People weren't interested." said a dejected Mr. Rob Whyte. "They wanted coffins made of real wood."
So I called the real-wood firms, three industrialists who manufactured coffins on an assembly line for the national market. "It's quiet," said Kurt Lammerding of GNG Pine Products. His competitors concurred - business was dead, so to speak.
"It's a fact," said Mr. A. B. Schwegman of B&A Coffins. "If you go on what you read in the papers, we should be overwhelmed, but there's nothing. So what's going on? You tell me."
You can tell me too, if you know the answer, but dont bother looking in the WTBTS literature for it as they only ever publish opinions that back up their claim that the end is nigh.
...and they don't seem too fussy who they get those opinions from.
