Lets not stigmatise the housewives part 2

[dr_toufique123]

Dear friends,

I agree that the article in 'Times of India' is in bad taste and irresponsible because it "stigmatizes". On top of it, I will like to add that this article uses very wrong way of interpreting results.

Friends, I am quoting a few paragraphs from the NFHS III final reports. Please go through it. I also request you to go through the table 12.10 quoted in the article and interpret this table yourself. I think, this kind of irresponsible journalism should not be allowed in a national paper of a sort of 'Times of India'.

Here are the paragraphs from the report:

"All women age 15-49 and men age 15-54 in households selected for the NFHS-3 HIV sample were eligible for HIV testing. For over 27,000 married couples, both the husband and the wife agreed to be tested for HIV in NFHS-3. Results shown in Table 12.10 indicate that both partners were HIV negative for 99.50 percent of couples and both partners were HIV positive for 0.11 percent of couples. The remaining 0.39 percent of couples had discordant HIV results, that is, one partner was infected and the other was not infected. For 82 percent of these discordant couples, the husband was HIV positive and the wife was HIV negative. The variation in the level of couple HIV infection by background characteristics generally conforms to the patterns observed with respect to the variation in individual seroprevalence rates. In addition, there are notable differences in HIV prevalence according to the relative ages of the marital partners. HIV positivity for both partners is highest when the
man is 15 or more years older than his wife. Discordant cases are highest when the man is 10-14 years older than his wife. HIV prevalence overall is lowest when the woman is older than her husband.

"A similar pattern of discordance is seen for the high HIV prevalence states in Table 12.11. In each of these states, when there is discordance, the man is much more likely than the woman to be HIV positive. In the five high HIV prevalence states combined, men are almost six times as likely to be HIV positive as women when the couple has discordant results. About 1 percent of all married couples in Manipur, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh have discordant HIV results. Manipur has the highest percentage of couples in which both marital partners are HIV positive ( 0.62 percent) and the highest percentage in which at least one of the marital partners is HIV positive (1.61 percent)."