Source: Vancouver Province Contact: Sun 26 Oct 1997 A4 Author: Jason Proctor, Staff Reporter HIV stats don't tell story: Docs: Numbers are just a drop in the bucket Vancouver health authorities dismissed as naive yesterday reports suggesting the rate of HIV infection in the city is going down. A mixup in figures from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control put the number of Vancouverites who tested positive last year for HIV, the virus which develops into AIDS, at 713. In fact, that figure is the number for B.C. The number of new cases in Vancouver was 469 a drop from the 590 testing positive in 1991. But Dr. John Blatherwick, VancouverRichmond health officer, said yesterday the Centre for Disease Control numbers which reflect people who have gone to a lab to be tested were only ever considered a drop in the bucket. And they weren't the figures on which the health board made the decision to call a medical emergency. ``I wish that was true,'' said Blatherwick, referring to the report that numbers have dropped. ``If you just looked at those stats, you'd say things aren't as bad as they are. They don't represent the real numbers.'' Blatherwick said the lab numbers do not represent the number of intravenous drug users who have spread the disease through the downtown east side. For that reason, doctors established the Vancouver Injection Drug Use Study out of St. Paul's Hospital, which surveyed 1,000 needle users. The initial numbers found 23 per cent of those people were HIV positive and that in the first few months of 1996, the rate of new infections was 18.6 per cent. That rate has since dropped to four per cent, said Blatherwick, but not because the epidemic does not exist. The absolute numbers went up meaning there were fewer new people among the 1,000 to infect. Dr. Martin Schechter, who runs the St. Paul's program, said the infection rate among people who voluntarily test is somewhat irrelevant to an epidemic among drug users. ``I think this entire report appears very naive,'' he said. ``It's very likely that there is a large majority of people who have not been tested.'' The provincial testing program's statistics also fail to consider the possibility that fewer people went in for tests last year than in 1991, said Blatherwick.