Number of Americans with HIV tops one million

[Nerthus]

Number of Americans with HIV tops one million

MORE than a million Americans are believed to be living with HIV for the first time since the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, the United States government said yesterday.

Critics say the new estimate reflects a failure of prevention and comes in the year that the US government had set as its deadline to "break the back" of the AIDS epidemic.

But doctors said the increase demonstrates advances in drug treatments that allow people to live longer with HIV.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said that between 1,039,000 and 1,185,000 people in the US were living with HIV in December 2003. The previous estimate - released in 2002 - said that between 850,000 and 950,000 people had the virus.

The jump reflects the role of medicines that have allowed people infected with the virus to live longer, said Dr Ronald Valdiserri, deputy director of the CDC's National Centre for HIV, STD and TB Prevention.

"While treatment advances have been an obvious godsend to those living with the disease, it presents new challenges for prevention," Dr Valdiserri said.

The challenges include overcoming a failure by the government to meet its 2005 goal of cutting in half the estimated 40,000 new HIV infections that have occurred every year since the 1990s.

There are 40 million people living with HIV in the world today and last year AIDS killed more than three million. Sub-Saharan Africa is by far the worst affected region, with 10 per cent of the world population but more than 60 per cent of all people living with HIV.

South Africa is home to the largest number of HIV-infected people in the world - well over five million - but India is catching up fast.



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[WebViro]

Ouch.

A bit scary for someone my age.

[Dr. Solar Wolff]

If you medicate AIDS ridden people into long life expectancy, they respond by infecting more people. The answer is obvious. By the way, in Public Health, the knee-jerk response to the word "epidemic" is the word "quarantine". If Will had prevailed instead of political correctness 25 years ago, the AIDS "epidemic" would be a historical note.