After years of steady declines, the number of Americans contracting and dying from AIDS appears to be leveling off, federal officials announced yesterday. The only bright spot officials reported was a significant decline -- 84 percent -- in the number of babies born with HIV infections since 1992, according to this article on CNN.com.
"The marked decline in deaths we saw when new AIDS treatments first became available seems to have stabilized," Jeffrey Koplan, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a statement released at a national HIV prevention conference in Atlanta.
In 1993, about 20,000 new cases of AIDS were reported every quarter in the United States. That fell to about 10,000 per quarter by 1998. There were also about 12,000 deaths quarterly in 1994, and that number dropped to 4,000 by 1998.
But since 1998 both those levels have remained essentially unchanged, says this MSNBC article.
There may be several factors responsible for the alarming statistical trend, CNN reports. One is that some people may have developed a resistance to the antiviral drugs that were so successful in forcing down the death-rate numbers. Also, people on these drugs may have experienced side effects and stopped taking their medications. The CDC also believes that some people may be putting off HIV testing and starting drug treatments later, when they aren't always as effective.
"We really are at a very critical point in this epidemic. We must work to ensure that the plateaus that we've reached will not remain plateaus -- or worse, given some of the trends that we're seeing, evolve into a newly expanding epidemic," Dr. Helene Gayle, AIDS chief for the CDC, said.
New studies released yesterday note that two key demographic groups -- young gay men and poor black women -- are at high risk for infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
A survey of gay men in Seattle revealed a troubling increase in the number of HIV-positive men reporting unprotected anal sex, up from 10 percent in 1998 to 20 percent in 2000, the MSNBC story says.
And a study of primarily poor black women in Atlanta found
almost half had not used a condom during their most recent sexual encounter. In addition, 60 percent of the women didn't know whether their partner was infected with HIV, the article says.
Blacks are now becoming infected with HIV at a much higher rate than whites. Of the approximately 40,000 new infections last year, more than half were among blacks. And black women are four times as likely to be infected with HIV than white women, MSNBC reports.
