Comments?? ((can't wait to hear the Demolib spin on how this is a Republican problem.....))
U.S. Health Officials Troubled by Latest AIDS Data
August 13, 2001 3:36 pm EST
By Paul Simao
ATLANTA (Reuters) - Federal health experts said on Monday the battle against the AIDS epidemic had stalled in the United States and the disease showed signs of making a strong comeback among gay and bisexual men and parts of the black community.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said its latest data from the first half of 2000 showed 16,000 Americans were dying from AIDS and 40,000 others were becoming infected each year with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes the disease.
These figures were largely unchanged from those reported in 1998, when health officials first observed that the epidemic had stabilized after declining sharply in the early 1990s.
AIDS destroys the immune system and leaves victims vulnerable to an array of opportunistic infections and cancers. It has killed about 450,000 Americans since it first surfaced in 1981.
"Two decades into the epidemic, these latest data show us that we are at a turning point," Dr. Helene Gayle, director of the CDC's National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention, said at the 2001 National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta.
"We either move forward toward further reducing HIV or risk going back to a period of elevated infections," Gayle said.
Health officials said they were particularly discouraged by a spate of studies that appeared to confirm reports that gay and bisexual men were engaging more frequently in unprotected anal sex and other high-risk sexual behavior.
One study released on Monday showed 20 percent of HIV-positive gay and bisexual men in Seattle reported having unprotected anal sex with HIV-negative partners or others with an unknown HIV status last year, nearly double the 1998 rate.
Sixteen percent of gay and bisexual men between the ages of 23 and 29 in Miami's South's Beach, home to one of the country's biggest gay communities, tested positive for HIV, according to another study.
Cynthia Gomez, a researcher at the University of California's Center for AIDS Prevention Studies in San Francisco, said the findings highlighted the need to rethink HIV prevention and treatment programs targeted at gay and bisexual men.
"This is not the same epidemic. We can not expect to repeat what we did in 1981 and expect it to have the same results," said Gomez, who added that the majority of gay men were continuing to practice safe sex on a consistent basis.
Those who attended the conference were also provided a sobering glimpse of attitudes toward HIV and AIDS in the black community, one of the groups hardest hit by the epidemic.
A survey by Atlanta's Morehouse School of Medicine revealed that almost half of poor black women between the ages of 17 and 44 in Atlanta had not used a condom during sex in the previous two months.
Sixty percent of those surveyed did not know their partner's HIV status, while 70 percent said they were not at risk or not at high risk of contracting the disease, said Ellen Yancey, who lead the survey.
The CDC, which hopes to cut the number of new annual HIV infections in half within five years, said the findings underlined the importance of concentrating HIV prevention and control programs on high-risk groups in minority communities.
Despite offering a largely gloomy snapshot of the battle against AIDS, the Atlanta-based CDC did note some positive trends for the epidemic.
It said the number of infants who contracted HIV from their mothers had declined 84 percent since peaking at 901 cases in 1992. Only 47 cases were reported in the first half of last year.
HIV rates also have plummeted among intravenous drug users, mostly due to the expansion of clean needle exchange programs.
About 20 percent of those who injected drugs in New York City were estimated to be infected with HIV last year, compared to 50 percent in 1990, according to Don Des Jarlais of New York's Beth Israel Medical Center. |
