Fight against Aids: How UNAids perpetuated the myth of condom effectiveness in Africa in the face of all the evidence

There are also cases where the link between education (an indicator of wealth) and HIV infection appear to change over time.

One study conducted by James R. Hargreaves of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and colleagues have documented such a change.

In early years of the epidemic it was seen that higher educated people had higher HIV rates, which was perhaps linked to wealth and mobility.

However, this seems to change over time where it becomes more protective as epidemics mature, and where the educated know more and are more likely to protect themselves from he deadly virus. Justin Parkhurst speculates that this process could also be observed with income.

According to experts the relationship between wealth and HIV prevalence is changing over time.

James Hargreaves of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and his colleagues conducted a systematic review of some 4000 abstracts and 1200 papers published peer reviewed articles, which compared individually, measured educational attainment and HIV status among at least 300 individuals representative of the general population of countries or regions of sub-Saharan Africa.

Thirty-six articles were included in the study, containing data on 72 discrete populations from 11 countries between 1987 and 2003, representing over 200,000 individuals.

What these researchers discovered was that studies on data collected prior to 1996 generally found either no association or the highest risk of HIV infection among the most educated.

Furthermore, studies conducted from 1996 onwards were more likely to find a lower risk of HIV infection among the most educated.

Where data over time were available, HIV prevalence fell more consistently among highly educated groups than among less educated groups, in whom HIV prevalence sometimes rose while overall population prevalence was falling.

In several populations, associations suggesting greater HIV risk in the more educated at earlier time points were replaced by weaker associations later.

Therefore, HIV infections appear to be shifting towards higher prevalence among the least educated in sub-Saharan Africa, reversing previous patterns.

Critics of UNAIDS says that it's worth remembering that UNAIDS is an advocacy and not a scientific body and that they should not be looked to for scientific answers or evidence.

Critics are quick to point out that UNAIDS is driven by politics, fund-raising and Western ideology, and not the empirical evidence.

However, its ideology is not shared by the majority of the countries where UNAIDS works.