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A scathing letter from Arcigay, Lila, Nadir, and Plus to the heads of the Istituto Superiore della Sanità (National Institute of Health) and Minister Beatrice Lorenzin, reported today by Repubblica, points to the "many shortcomings" of our national epidemiology. "Today – they denounce – there is no universally reliable data available on how many people live in our country with HIV infection, on how many new diagnoses there are each year and how many of these are late diagnoses. Not even the number of people who die of AIDS each year is known, as emerges from the publications of the same COA (2, 3) with an unacceptable gap between what is found in the surveillance bulletin (45) and what is estimated in scientific publications of the same COA (1500). In fact, for some years the data coming from the surveillance system released by the Department of Infectious, Parasitic and Immune-Mediated Diseases have been greeted with embarrassment and scepticism by the scientific community and by the associations present in the National AIDS Commission and in the Consultation of AIDS Associations of the Ministry of Health. Another serious gap is the data on the prevalence and incidence of the infection in populations vulnerable to HIV, in particular men who have sex with men, people who inject drugs, people who prostitute themselves, prisoners. In these populations the few Data, when available, is unreliable and outdated. This means that while international strategies are being implemented to target what are considered "key" populations requiring prompt intervention, Italy is once again lagging behind.
“"Paradoxically," they continue, "even a simple statistic like the number of HIV antibody tests performed annually in our country is missing. Without this data, it's impossible to understand the fluctuations in the incidence of new diagnoses, as there's no clear denominator for how many people have been tested. Overall, the strong impression one gets is that any in-depth research done is geared more toward self-referential scientific publications than toward providing a clear, shared, and, above all, useful epidemiological framework for the synergistic planning of strategies and actions by national and regional institutions and civil society organizations.".
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A scathing letter from Arcigay, Lila, Nadir, and Plus to the heads of the Istituto Superiore della Sanità (National Institute of Health) and Minister Beatrice Lorenzin, reported today by Repubblica, points to the "many shortcomings" of our national epidemiology. "Today – they denounce – there is no universally reliable data available on how many people live in our country with HIV infection, on how many new diagnoses there are each year and how many of these are late diagnoses. Not even the number of people who die of AIDS each year is known, as emerges from the publications of the same COA (2, 3) with an unacceptable gap between what is found in the surveillance bulletin (45) and what is estimated in scientific publications of the same COA (1500). In fact, for some years the data coming from the surveillance system released by the Department of Infectious, Parasitic and Immune-Mediated Diseases have been greeted with embarrassment and scepticism by the scientific community and by the associations present in the National AIDS Commission and in the Consultation of AIDS Associations of the Ministry of Health. Another serious gap is the data on the prevalence and incidence of the infection in populations vulnerable to HIV, in particular men who have sex with men, people who inject drugs, people who prostitute themselves, prisoners. In these populations the few Data, when available, is unreliable and outdated. This means that while international strategies are being implemented to target what are considered "key" populations requiring prompt intervention, Italy is once again lagging behind.
“"Paradoxically," they continue, "even a simple statistic like the number of HIV antibody tests performed annually in our country is missing. Without this data, it's impossible to understand the fluctuations in the incidence of new diagnoses, as there's no clear denominator for how many people have been tested. Overall, the strong impression one gets is that any in-depth research done is geared more toward self-referential scientific publications than toward providing a clear, shared, and, above all, useful epidemiological framework for the synergistic planning of strategies and actions by national and regional institutions and civil society organizations.".
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