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NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY OF DAILY KANSAN
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2007
HEALTH
Group says government miscalculates AIDS cases
BY MIKE STOBBE ASSOCIATED PRESS
ATLANTA — Advocacy groups say new government estimates will show at least 35 percent more Americans are infected with the AIDS virus each year than the government has been reporting.
Government officials acknowledge they are revising the estimate, which they say is not yet complete.
But advocates are pushing for the government to release the number now. They say the delay may be partly political, and that it's hurting prevention funding.
"Across the AIDS community, there is an incredible amount of suspicion," said Julie Davids, executive director of the advocacy group Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP).
U. S. health officials have been estimating about 40,000 new HIV cases occur in the nation each year. However, at a national HIV prevention conference in Atlanta this week, advocates claimed the new estimate was 55,000 or higher.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the numbers were being reviewed for accuracy and wouldn't be released until early next year.
The new estimate is based on new testing technology, said Dr. Kevin Fenton, who oversees CDC's prevention operations for AIDS and several other diseases.
The data have been submitted to a scientific journal for more rigorous review to ensure accuracy. They are expected to be released early next year, CDC officials said.
Estimates on new infections help health officials decide how much to spend on prevention programs. Although the estimated number of new infections has held steady at 40,000 for more than a decade, federal funding for HIV prevention in
recent years has declined. Advocates say the trend has severely weakened community organizations that provide prevention and other services to people with HIV.
Although CDC hasn't released any number, the estimate of 55,000 has been circulating among various experts as part of the peer-review process, said Walt Senterffit, a Los Angeles County epidemiologist who chairs CHAMP's governing board.
It's not clear if the rate of HIV infection has been rising, or whether previous estimates were simply wrong. Davids said.
"But either way, this shows that prevention efforts are insufficient," she said.
CHAMP officials say they believe the CDC is concerned about getting the new estimate right. But they added that advocates have been pushing for a better estimate for years, and that the Bush administration has suppressed important public health information before.
This would not be the first time AIDS statistics have been dramatically revised. Globally, the estimated number of people with HIV fell from 40 million to 33 million last month after the United Nations AIDS agency cited new analysis.
Landing an accurate number has been difficult, for several reasons, CDC officials say. HIV can take several years to develop into visible illness, so new infections are not spotted easily. Blood tests can reveal the virus, but most people don't get tested each year. HIV tests traditionally have not been able to pinpoint when a person was infected. A new test can show if infection occurred within the previous six months.
"It's difficult for us in the United States, and no surveillance system in the world is as sophisticated as ours," said Dr. Rob lanssen, director of the CDC's Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention.
SCIENCE
Are you smarter than a chimp?
Monkey bests humans in memory test; scientists say skills decrease with age
BY MALCOLM RITTER ASSOCIATED PRESS
A chimpanzee named Ayumu performs the second stage of a memory test in which he must recall the location on a touch-sensitive monitor of numerals that have changed to squares at the Primate Research Institute in Kyoto, Japan. Ayumu scored better than college students on the test, but scientists next want to compare Ayumu's skills with those of younger humans.
NEW YORK — Think you're smarter than a fifth-grader? How about a 5-year-old chimp? Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
That challenges the belief of many people, including many scientists, that "humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions," said researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University.
"No one can imagine that chimpanzees — young chimpanzees at the age of 5 — have a better performance in a memory task than humans," he said in a statement.
Matsuzawa, a pioneer in studying the mental abilities of chimps, said even he was surprised. He and colleague Sana Inoue report the results in Tuesday's issue of the journal Current Biology.
One memory test included three 5-year-old chimps whod been taught the order of Arabic numerals 1 through 9, and a dozen human volunteers.
They saw nine numbers displayed on a computer screen. When they touched the first number, the other eight turned into white squares. The test was to touch all these squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there.
Results showed that the chimps, while no more accurate than the people, could do this faster.
One chimp, Ayumu, did the best. Researchers included him and nine college students in a second test.
This time, five numbers flashed on the screen only briefly before they were replaced by white squares. The challenge, again, was to touch these squares in the proper sequence.
When the numbers were displayed for about seven-tenths of a
second. Ayumu and the college students were both able to do this correctly about 80 percent of the time.
But when the numbers were displayed for just four-tenths or two-tenths of a second, the chimp was the champ. The briefer of those times is too short to allow a look around the screen, and in those tests Ayumu still scored about 80 percent, while humans plunged to 40 percent.
That indicates Ayumu was better at taking in the whole pattern of numbers at a glance, the researchers wrote.
"It's amazing what this chimpanzee is able to do," said Elizabeth Lonsdorf, director of the Lester E.
Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. The center studies the mental abilities of apes, but Lonsdorf didn't participate in the new study.
She admired Ayumu's performance when the numbers flashed only briefly on the screen.
"I just watched the video of that, and I can tell you right now, there's no way I can do it," she said. "It's unbelievable. I can't even get the first two (squares)."
What's going on here? Even with six months of training, three students failed to catch up to the three young chips, Matsuzawa said in an e-mail.
He thinks two factors gave his chimps the edge. For one thing, he believes human ancestors gave up much of this skill over evolutionary time to make room in the brain for gaining language abilities.
The other factor is the youth of Ayumu and his peers. The memory for images that's needed for the tests resembles a skill found in children, but which dissipates with age. In fact, the young chimpms performed better than older chimps in the new study. (Ayumu's mom did even worse than the college students).
So the next logical step, Lonsdorf said, is to fix up Ayumu with some real competition on these tests: little kids.
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