CDC Revises U.S. HIV Annual Rate Sharply Upwards

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a new report on HIV infections in the USA that indicated it has been under estimating the annual HIV incidence rate by nearly 40 percent for at least a decade.

AIDS activists were appalled that it took the CDC so long to publicly release these numbers when the data has been available (and leaked in AIDS public policy circles) since at least last November. The agency claims that it was waiting for the peer review process to be completed, and the report is published as a freely available article in a special issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The bad news:

Using sophisticated testing to identify new infections, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that there are about 56,300 new infections each year, not the 40,000 figure that has been gospel for so long.[emphasis added]

[...]

The new numbers do not mean that the epidemic is growing in this country, just that researchers have been able to provide more accurate estimates, said Dr. Kevin Fenton, director of the CDC's National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention. He said the number of new infections has remained relatively constant since the late 1990s.

[...]

The new numbers "reveal that the U.S. epidemic is -- and has been -- worse than previously estimated and serve as a wake-up call for all Americans," said Richard Wolitski, acting director of the division of HIV/AIDS prevention at the national center.

In the latest UNAIDS report on the state of AIDS worldwide the latest U.S. data is not included. And California is not included in the latest U.S. data (although the CDC is extrapolating "sophisticatedly" to produce a national annual HIV incidence rate of 56,000) since the government agency refuses to include any data which is not based on names-based HIV surveillance data. As of 2006, that meant that the U.S. estimate is based on actual data from 22 states.

According to TowleRoad, both (Democratic and Republican) U.S. presidential candidates issued statements in response to the revised CDC data on HIV incidence rates in the United States.