Steve Quayle News Alerts

July 28, 2003
By Rob Stein

The number of new AIDS cases in the United States appears to have begun to rise again for the first time in 10 years, federal health officials reported today.

The number of Americans diagnosed with AIDS increased 2.2 percent in 2002, the first time the incidence of the disease has risen since 1993, according to preliminary data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

If confirmed in the final analysis of the national data collected annually by the CDC, the increase could mark a disturbing turning point in the AIDS epidemic in the United States, which had appeared to be stabilizing because of decades of intensive safe sex campaigns and the introduction of powerful new anti-viral drugs.

The overall increase could be driven by a rise in new infections of the HIV virus that causes AIDS among gay men. There have been disturbing indications in the past few years that risky sexual behavior has been increasing among gay men, particularly younger ones, causing the number of new HIV infections to begin to rise again. That could have begun to translate into a jump in new AIDS cases.

"Our biggest concern is what appears to be a resurgent epidemic in gay men," said Harold Jaffe, director of the CDC's National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention.

In fact, data from 25 states show the number of new HIV diagnoses among gay and bisexual men increased 7.1 percent from 2001 to 2002, marking the third consecutive year that infections have risen in that high-risk group. HIV diagnoses among gay and bisexual men have increased by 17.7 percent since they hit an all-time low in 1999.

"I don't think there is any one explanation," Jaffe said in a telephone interview. "Some of it may be related to treatment optimism: 'So what if you get infected? You can get treated.' Some of it may be related to the belief that if you are in treatment you may not transmit the virus. Some may be epidemic fatigue -- being tired of hearing about it."

"I think the most compelling reason is that people aren't scared any more. If you were a gay man in the 1980s you were scared. You had a lot of friends who were sick and dying. If you are a gay man today you don't have a lot of sick peers," Jaffe said.

No parallel increase in HIV infections has been detected in any other groups, Jaffe said.

But according to the preliminary analysis of the incidence of new cases of actual AIDS, the number increased from 41,227 cases in 2001 to 42,136 cases in 2002 -- a 2.2 percent increase. The AIDS incidence numbers increased steadily through the 1980s and into the 1990s, reaching a peak of 80,010 cases in 1993. The numbers had declined every year since.

Researchers will have to do additional analysis to confirm the increase and to determine whether the new cases are occurring largely among gay men, Jaffe said.

On the positive side, the number of deaths from AIDS continued to decline in 2002, dropping 5.9 percent, said Jaffe, who presented the new data at the National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta.

But that decrease represents somewhat of a slowdown in the decline in deaths, which dropped dramatically because of the introduction of powerful new treatments in the mid-1990s.

"The AIDS epidemic in the United States is far from over," Jaffe said. "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."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55814-2003Jul28.html