ESTIMATING HIV AIDS INCIDENCE - ADJUSTING CASE-REPORTS FOR CHANGES INDEFINITION/

The purpose of this paper is to assess different procedures used in th e modeling of the AIDS epidemic that account for changes in the defini tion of AIDS. Specifically, we assess three methods that adjust for th e effect of definition changes on the modeling of HIV reconstructions. Our results suggest that how we account for definition changes is a c ritical influence on the severity and the shape of the estimated HIV/A IDS epidemic. Also, the scope of the recent (1993) definition change i s sufficiently broad to limit approaches based on adjusting to a singl e, consistent definition. The most realistic approach appears to be on e based on a dynamic disease progression model that accounts for AIDS definition changes via changes in disease incubation.