Anyone thinking that the United Nations is an upright, honest and honorable organization that can be trusted across the board probably should have been paying a bit more attention when the oil-for-food scandal broke a couple of years back.

If the corruption involved in that mess didn't get people taking a second look toward that big building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, perhaps this confession of years of fabrication and dispensing of false information on the global AIDS situation might raise an eyebrow or three.

Seems that after more than a decade of slapping back accusations that the UN has been making up numbers as they go along, their AIDS 'experts' will be stepping up this week and admitting that they have "long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade."

The latest estimates, due to be released publicly Tuesday, put the number of annual new HIV infections at 2.5 million, a cut of more than 40 percent from last year's estimate, documents show. The worldwide total of people infected with HIV -- estimated a year ago at nearly 40 million and rising -- now will be reported as 33 million.

What's the big deal here? Why should anyone care if the UN has been spouting figures that are off by millions? After all, AIDS is a serious problem, millions of people are victims and new infections happen all the time.

Aside from the fact that collecting and disseminating accurate data is something the UN has an entire huge arm set up especially for that spends tons of money hosting seminars all over the place that are meant to get everyone on board with the UN's system of keeping track of numbers; like this one in Turkey last June organized to: examine how the global statistical system ensures the compilation of internationally comparable indicators and statistics. Full comparability requires certain pre-requisites, including a system to develop accepted compilation standards as well as professional norms and values governing the production of the indicators.

No only delivering a heck of a lot less than what the UN has claimed as a large part of its mandate, there are many who suggest that playing fast and loose with the figures may have been an intentional ploy to "gather political and financial support for combating AIDS."

That doesn't sound like a bad thing until you realize that any political and financial support going one way means there is a heck of a lot less for other directions ... malaria programs, food programs, education and health in general, etc., etc., etc..

Helen Epstein, author of "The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS", is quoted as saying: "There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda."

I've been mad for years about the whole UNICEF gimmick of turning kids into panhandlers every Halloween, but the thought that the world's AIDS victims have been used as a method of money raising makes me ill.

The UN statement will suggest that methodology was the reason for the inflated figures some call alarmist. Epstein and others say politics and lazy science have more to do with what is now about to be admitted to be misleading information.

The revisions affect not just current numbers but past ones as well. A UNAIDS report from December 2002, for example, put the total number of HIV cases at 42 million. The real number at that time was 30 million, the new report says.

The downward revisions also affect estimated numbers of orphans, AIDS deaths and patients in need of costly antiretroviral drugs -- all major factors in setting funding levels for the world's response to the epidemic.

When it comes to the UN, someone really should be checking their work.