The Swine Line

The Washington Post reports that the scientist in charge of the UN agency responsible for tracking and funding AIDS programs worldwide, UNAIDS, is set to reveal that his agency has long been overestimating the size, scope, and course of the disease for many years!  The Post reports that new, “revised” numbers will show that the spread of the disease has been slowing for awhile now and that the true number of AIDS cases worldwide is actually lower than it previously reported by 40 percent!

This comment comes a few graphs into the article:

Having millions fewer people with a lethal contagious disease is good news. Some researchers, however, contend that persistent overestimates in the widely quoted U.N. reports have long skewed funding decisions and obscured potential lessons about how to slow the spread of HIV. Critics have also said that U.N. officials overstated the extent of the epidemic to help gather political and financial support for combating AIDS.

Incredible and scandalous.  But nowhere in the Post article is the reader educated about where this agency gets its revenues (members states, like the US, perhaps?), nor does the article give the reader any estimates of how many American tax dollars have been (mis) appropriated based upon these bogus estimates.