South Africa says international markets ...(3)
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In regard to the issue of MDs writing that children died of malnu-
trition rather than AIDS, your comment is interesting and I am
aware that they are required to document if it is an AIDS fatality
and submit to Home Affairs. It is the MDs who are reluctant to do
this citing insurance problems for the families as one of their
concerns.
I made this comment in echo of a remark that appeared on this forum
last year. If the benefit of the South-African law are to be meas-
ured, it will need corrected statistics, otherwise it could introduce
a bias that could lead to an apparent increase in mortalities. I as-
sume that persons around the world are placing high hopes in the
South-African law, but it would be desirable to scientifically docu-
ment its benefits, thus the need to estimate the proportion of AIDS-
deaths that were reported as "malnutrition" whatever the reason was.
Perhaps anonymous interviews of randomly chosen MDs could help to
compute such estimate for each year and their corresponding error
margins.
Hope this helps.
Christian Labadie
mailto:CLabadie@t-online.de
-- On Sat, 29 Jul 2000 appeared on AFRO-NETS the following:
This reminds me of the time that I failed an exam in
South Africa in the early 90's because I had made a
clinical diagnosis of AIDS in a child and apparently
I had made a "mistake" and obviously that child officially
had "malnutrition" and I suspect did not respond to
treatment for malnutrition. [1]
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