Kevin de Cock has now put his name to a mealy-mouthed UNAIDS/WHO press release which is billed as a “correction” to a story in The Independent last week, which quoted him as saying:

“It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in other countries [outside Africa]. Ten years ago a lot of people were saying there would be a generalised epidemic in Asia – China was the big worry with its huge population. That doesn’t look likely.”

The “correction” doesn’t actually point to any errors in the original story. It doesn’t say Dr. de Cock was misquoted. It doesn’t provide any solid evidence that he is wrong. Instead, it comes out with technically correct but completely irrelevant gems such as this:

“Heterosexual transmission continues to drive the epidemic among sex workers, their clients, and their clients’ partners. In addition, prisoners, injecting drug users, as well as men who have sex with men, may also engage in heterosexual relationships.”

My earlier flippancy notwithstanding, I was genuinely pleased by the story in The Independent. Dr de Cock had started to chip away at the wall of institutional self-interest known as UNAIDS, a wall that requires HIV to be an on-going threat to all of humanity. He had told it like it was; describing a problem accurately is surely a precursor to dealing with it effectively, something that he has been trying to do in difficult circumstances for many years. Apparently, those inside the wall of self-interest twisted Dr de Cock’s arm hard enough to put him out of action. I can think of no other reason that he would put his name to this kind of tosh.

Laurance quotes Kevin de Cock, a thoughtful and honest scientist who happens also to head up WHO’s HIV division, as saying “It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in other countries [outside Africa]. Ten years ago a lot of people were saying there would be a generalised epidemic in Asia – China was the big worry with its huge population. That doesn’t look likely.”

While it’s not clear in what context de Cock made the comments, Laurance describes them as “the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected”.

Regular readers know that I specialise in railing against spending HIV prevention money on populations that were never at risk in the first place. And I believe that the UN organisations have been at fault for “beating up” the epidemic to make it look as though everyone is at risk. So I could just claim that this is a vindication of what I’ve been saying all along. But to be fair, the story is itself a little bit of a beat-up. Careful readers of the epidemiological sections of WHO/UNAIDS reports will see that they have for some time now tried to draw a distinction between the epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa and that in the rest of the world. It is the other UN organisations that are “co-sponsors” of UNAIDS that gain more from the “everyone is at risk” mantra. The agencies that deal with young people and education and migration and labour and whatnot, the ones that want to get their snouts in the AIDS funding trough without really getting down and dirty with sex and drugs.

Is de Cock saying anything we didn’t already know? No (although his comments continue to excite a bit of comment in the blogosphere, at the WSJ online for example, Slog, and Sweetness and Light. Is his admission a big reversal of WHO policy? Not really. Does it allow me (and many others who have been banging the same drum) to say “I told you so”? Absolutely!