On the weekend of Friday 29 August, the National Department of Health placed their report on the results of the 2007 national antenatal survey, carried out a little over 10 months ago, on their website.1 The Department uses these results (showing an overall HIV prevalence of 28%) to reinforce those of the previous survey2 and argue that 'South Africa may be making some real progress in its response to the HIV epidemic' and that the 'South African HIV epidemic is on a downward trend'. While this may or may not be true, in order for one to infer a trend in indicators from a sequence of surveys they need to be comparable, year on year, with one another. Unfortunately this is not the case with the antenatal surveys of the past 2 years