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TechnoratiUS Has 'Under-Estimated Spread of HIV by 40 Percent'
LOS ANGELES - The United States has been under-estimating the spread of HIV by more than 40 per cent per year for the past decade, according to newly-published research indicating that the domestic AIDS epidemic may be far more widespread than previously thought.
A new testing technique has revealed that roughly 56,300 Americans were infected by the virus in 2006, the last year for which data is available. That's a significant increase from the 40,000 cited as standard by politicians and medical experts for the past fifteen years.
The results of a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Government body in charge of tracking AIDS in the US, suggest that more than 1,325,000 more people may now be living with HIV in America. Previous estimates had always put the figure closer to one million
Health officials said the revised figures reflect the recent development of better blood tests combined with new statistical methods, rather than any actual worsening in the epidemic. But they are likely to refocus attention on the scale of the problem in America's own backyard.
Despite being highly critical of prevention efforts in many other countries, the White House has frozen spending on domestic HIV prevention for the past seven years. Dr Julie Gerberding, the CDC director, said the findings, in a peer-reviewed study, suggested that current policies are "unacceptable."
The report was unveiled at the international AIDS conference in Mexico City this weekend. It shows that the brunt of the epidemic is being borne by gay men, who account for 53 percent of new infections. There have been small declines among heterosexuals and injectable drug users.
Ethnic minorities are also revealed to be facing an increased risk of HIV: infection rates for blacks are seven times higher than for whites (83.7 per 100,000, as opposed to 11.5 per 100,000), while Hispanics (29.3 per 100,000) are also disproportionately affected.
"The figures are a scathing indictment of how profoundly US prevention efforts have failed," Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare foundation, told reporters. "There is absolutely no good news here. Without an accurate picture of the epidemic, vastly underestimated for the last 10 years, we have missed countless opportunities to intervene with effective public health strategies."
The release of the CDC report at the weekend has been the subject of significant controversy in the medical community. Government researchers first knew of its findings since October, but refused to publish them until they were peer reviewed.
That move that prompted the UK medical journal The Lancet to accuse the Bush administration of supressing inconvenient information. In a highly-critical editorial, the journal declared: "US efforts to prevent HIV have failed dismally."
Although the CDC had attempted to stage-manage the report's release at the weekend, its policy was thrown into chaos on Saturday after US journalists broke an embargo to report on its findings 24 hours earlier than was previously planned.
After for years being criticised for pursuing an apparently outdated domestoc policy on AIDS, which focused on promoting abstemious behaviour rather than safe sex, President Bush this week signaled the adoption of a more enlightened approach to tackling the epidemic.
In addition to announcing plans to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act, which has for years prevented foreigners infected with HIV from entering the country, he signed a $48 billion AIDS prevention bill, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a move warmly praised by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon at the opening of the Mexico conference.
© 2008 The Independent
10 Comments so far
Show AllMERRYOLDSOUL, are you a student? CD seems overrun with students and their stupid comments, which is why I'm tired of CommonDreams now, and it's articles from the "mainstream", corporate media.
Are you telling me that, by virtue of being straight, people will be moral and caring?
Is every murderer, rapist, dictator, etc., gay?
Yeah and throw Larry Craig in there, and about forty percent of the southern butt-f***ing politicaians, Bush himself, tried cornholio, just ask his stepford, wife
skippyagogo41 writes: "Marriage promotes fidelity, just as it does in the hetro world..."
First, the amount of sexually transmitted diseases spread by heterosexuals is large. So, this is not about fidelity or marriage - it's about evolution exploiting sex! The only way to guarantee stopping the spread of STDs is for everyone to have just one sexual partner for life.
HIV has nothing to do with one's sexual orientation. Gay people didn't create the virus through their sexual behavior. Cats suffer from feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV), and monkeys get infected with the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV).
HIV is just more evolution at play: a virus - that is, a bit of RNA material coated in a protein (it's not a living creature at all! More like a speck of dust) - that is blindly replicated by our cells because our cells are like an automated factory, doing without knowing. The HIV virus, by itself, does nothing destructive at all. It's not alive! How can it?
Viewed that way, HIV isn't sinister at all. It's our cells' "stupidity" that's the problem.
HIV is a bit like a spanner - inert and completely harmless - unless you jam it in the workings of a machine!
Marriage promotes fidelity, just as it does in the hetro world. But no, fidelity is not dependent on marriage, nor does marriage guarantee fidelity. The point I was trying to make is that by excluding gays from that civil ceremony the gov't is making the point that we're not real adults. Did you not notice how people treated you before and after a marriage? Marriage implies being responsible. Surely that is not something bad.
I do disagree with you on your point about the disease being endemic. It's a damn hard thing to catch and spread. Far easier to get preggers than it is to catch that std, thank goddess.
Everyone with AIDS like symptoms and diseases has the HIV retrovirus. Not everyone with hiv develops antibodies. The virus itself can be detected and counted these days wdmax3.
Whatever this syndrome is, called for convenience HIV/AIDS even if that's not accurate, it is now ENDEMIC in the population. Hello ! Retroviruses GO INTO HIDING in their hosts. That is their nature. It is not, any more, a 'gay' disease or any other goddam thing, it is something which most people have by now been exposed to in one form or another. In moderately healthy people who are exposed to a mild form of it, it will go into hiding and they will never suspect a thing. There is much more to this retrovirus than we presently understand.
There will be many more articles like this to gradually 'accustom' us to the idea that it is endemic.
And, out of curiousity, skippyagogo41, why in the world is 'fidelity among gay men' dependent on the 'right to marriage' ? What utter BS, fidelity has nothing to do with a piece of paper and the idea that gay men are not prone to fidelity because they are denied the right to marry is, well, really gay.
Here I go again...
There are those that test positive for H.I.V., but do not show the signs of illnesses related to A.I.D.S. for many years of their life (Magic Johnson 18 years). Some take the H.I.V. cocktail and some do not.
There are are those that have the symptoms and illnesses related to A.I.D.S. (called symptomatic H.I.V. patients) and they live a short life racked with illnesses due to a compromised immune system.
H.I.V. is not A.I.D.S., stop using the two synonymously until there is better science to support America's politically engineered fabrication of a virus that supposedly causes and or indicates an autoimmune deficiency syndrome - A.I.D.S.
The logic in not there. Look at it this way... Statement: All old gray haired men are senile. We know this to be false because old gray haired wise men exist. We also know that there are people who are not yet old and gray that are senile - George W. Bush.
Seriously though folks, until they separate the data into two separate sets (H.I.V. and A.I.D.S.) we will never really know the facts associated with this epidemic.
Fact: People who eat diets rich in animal protein show a higher susceptibility to cancer and other diseases, read "The China Study".
Fact: Most deadly and debilitating diseases were/are borne from the domestication of animals and crossed over to humans. Leukemia (bovine leukemia crossover to humans controversial), small pox (chicken pox, measles), swine flu, S.A.R.S, bird flu, etc...
Fact: Bovine A.I.D.S. is a problem a.k.a B.S.E - Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy a.k.a Mad Cow.
Fact: Mad Cow (B.S.E.) as the human variant is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
CDC link: http://wwwn.cdc.gov/travel/yellowBookCh4-VariantPrions.aspx
They are playing with words and playing with our lives.
Historical Fact: The truth about the harmful affects from smoking tobacco was hidden from the public for many years. Our government supported and was supported by the tobacco industry and its lobby.
Who does our government serve?
"That move that prompted the UK medical journal The Lancet to accuse the Bush administration of supressing inconvenient information. In a highly-critical editorial, the journal declared: "US efforts to prevent HIV have failed dismally.""
This administration is well known for either supressing or altering inconvenient information; and everything they have touched has turned to manure!
Its easy to be so far off. Its an old beaucratic trick ... if you don't want to spend money solving a problem, don't look for the problem.
Of course, if this goes back 'ten years' we are talking Clinton and the Democrats as well as Bush. Don't be so quick just to blame ol' Bushie as the sole reason for the problem. The article says 10 years in one place and 15 in another. 15 would cover almost the entire Clinton years as well.
I haven't figured out what I really think about all of this. Even though I read this article from NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93224781
that attributes the findings to better tests that can determine if the infection is new or old, I still don't understand how they could have been so off, especially since this is a trend that has apparently been over the last 10 years. 16,000 "extra" new cases over 10 years would be 160,000 extra new cases coming into the system in the last 10 years and it seems that surveillance should have seen this sooner but their are many issues with HIV surveillance.
It is hard not to question the role of "willful ignoring".
But it also underlines the Bush Whitehouse's tendency to rely on wishful thinking rather than science based practice. Clearly needle exchange programs and safer sex programs have a real role in prevention of spread and it is hard not to say that pushing real science based practice might not have saved some of those folks from infection.
That move that prompted the UK medical journal The Lancet to accuse the Bush administration of supressing inconvenient information. In a highly-critical editorial, the journal declared: "US efforts to prevent HIV have failed dismally."
It depends on your poing of view now doesn't it? Given the bush admin's disdain for human life, and its opposition to any sort of gay rights, it's quite concievable that the admin wants as many gay people infected as possible. They want, as do the rabid fundy's, gay people to suffer horribly then die. After they die they fully expect us to burn in hell. What makes gay people that different from the Islamic terrorists, anyway?
They teach abstinance lessons to make sure that people think condoms are worse than useless, then profess surprise that the rate of hiv transmission goes up. They oppose the right to marriage that would promote fidelity among gay men and wonder why gay people would rather be dead than old.
Christ on a stick! Of course the us gov't underestimated the spread of hiv. Haven't they underestimated the depth of resistance to us rule in Iraq? Didn't they underestimate the number of WMDs in Iraq? Didn't they underestimate the risk of terrorists using planes to kill thousands? Shit! What hasn't the us gov't under bush underestimated? By the way, a decade ago Clinton was in office, so don't think I'll only damn bush for this sort of thing.