- AIDS cases and new HIV infections appear to be resurging
among gay and bisexual men nationwide, according to officials with the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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- "The AIDS epidemic in the United States is far from
over," said Dr. Harold Jaffe, director of the CDC branch focused on
AIDS prevention. Jaffe will present his findings today in Atlanta at the
National HIV Prevention Conference.
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- The national findings agree with earlier studies done
by public health officials in Seattle and San Francisco that found dramatically
increased rates of new HIV infections and other sexually transmitted diseases
among gay and bisexual men.
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- "It's more evidence of bad news for the gay community,"
said Dr. Robert Wood, director of the HIV/AIDS program for Public Health
-- Seattle & King County. Wood, who is gay and has been battling his
own HIV infection for 20 years, attributed the recent surge in new infections
to complacency, "burnout" or just recklessness.
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- The CDC found that the number of new HIV diagnoses among
gay and bisexual men increased 7.1 percent between 2001 and 2002. The agency's
estimate is based on information collected from the 25 states that report
HIV and AIDS cases according to CDC requirements, which call for names
to be reported to the CDC, something Washington, California and other states
do not allow.
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- Jaffe and his colleagues said new HIV diagnoses in the
gay and bisexual population studied have increased nearly 18 percent since
1999 and preliminary data show a 2.2 percent increase in new AIDS cases
-- indicating the anti-AIDS drugs used by people with HIV may be losing
power as the virus becomes more resistant.
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- "While effective treatments are crucial in our fight
against HIV, preventing infection in the first place is still the only
true protection against the serious and fatal consequences of this disease,"
Jaffe said in a CDC statement announcing the report. HIV diagnosis rates
in other vulnerable groups have remained stable, he said.
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- Wood, who is also at the Atlanta conference this week,
said the CDC is likely understating the problem given that the agency excluded
states such as Washington, California and New York from the study for lack
of compliant HIV reporting. Yet these are also some of the states with
higher rates of HIV.
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- "If these states had been included, my guess is
the picture would look a lot worse," Wood said. The Seattle-King County
study, he noted, found a 60 percent projected increase in new HIV infections
among gay and bisexual men.
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- The CDC distinguished between new HIV diagnoses and new
infections because, in most cases, there is no way to determine when a
person became infected. But Wood said Seattle and San Francisco public
health officials are testing a new method comparing two types of HIV antibody
tests that, given certain results, can identify a newly acquired virus.
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- "What we're seeing is that higher proportion of
the new cases are recently infected," he said. The experience in Seattle,
Wood said, appears to be an accurate bellwether for what's happening throughout
the nation.
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- "These findings add to the growing concern that
we are facing a potential resurgence of HIV among gay and bisexual men,"
Jaffe said.
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- The CDC urged HIV testing as a routine part of medical
care and a renewed emphasis on prevention.
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- In Seattle and King County, Wood said, many people in
the gay community have taken it upon themselves to sound the alarm about
this disturbing new trend and to launch a new campaign encouraging safe
sex and personal responsibility.
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- Several organizations have come together with the health
department to form an HIV-prevention task force.
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