The chair of the AIDS Foundation board, Simon Robb, has disagreed with claims by his predecessor that Maori are over-represented in New Zealand's HIV/AIDS statistics, reiterating that men who have sex with men are “clearly” most at risk. In material presented at the Pan Pacific AIDS Conference last week and subsequently reported in newspapers around the country, former NZAF board chair Dr Clive Aspin largely ignored the exploding epidemic of HIV amongst gay and bisexual men in New Zealand to suggest that Maori were in fact at much higher risk of HIV/AIDS than the rest of the population. “The statistics we're relying upon don't demonstrate that, so he might be relying on information that I'm not privy to,” NZAF board chair Simon Robb told GayNZ.com. “But at this point in time, the epidemiology information that we receive from Otago is that it doesn't show that there's an over-representation, and I trust that is the case.” Robb's conclusions are backed up by both the AIDS Foundation's Research Director, Tony Hughes; and Professor Charlotte Paul, associate director of the AIDS Epidemiology Group at Otago University, whose statistics were innaccurately used by Aspin to claim over-representation of Maori in HIV/AIDS figures. “Clive is an academic, he's a researcher,” says Robb. “He takes his role very seriously, and academic freedom permits him to say what he wishes to say.” Aspin's claims that heterosexual Maori women were over-represented in New Zealand's HIV statistics compared to non-Maori were based on figures that show 8 Maori women have been diagnosed with HIV since 1996. By comparison, over four hundred men who have sex with men have been diagnosed with HIV since 1996. Aspin was last week extensively critical of GayNZ.com's coverage of this issue during his speech at the Closing Plenery of the Pan Pacific AIDS Conference, during an address billed as “Strengthening Leadership”. Aspin placed our coverage in the context of a racist environment for Maori. Earlier in the year, Aspin resigned from the board of the AIDS Foundation following fallout from comments he made at an international conference while chair of the board, in which he suggested opposition to a 50% Maori quota for NZAF board members was racist.
Credit: GayNZ.com News Staff
First published: Saturday, 5th November 2005 - 12:00pm