Last week UNAIDS announced a new estimate for the number of people infected with the HIV virus, ahead of AIDS Day on December 1. The latest estimate, 33 million people infected, is substantially reduced from the previous estimate of 39 million people, based in part on better surveillance data from India. CGD senior fellow Mead Over discusses the implications of the new figures for the global response to HIV/AIDS. He concludes that the new numbers change little: expenditures on AIDS, whether for prevention or treatment, should be based on the costs and benefits of the proposed intervention rather than the total number of cases.
