CDC Release HIV Figures

[Lee]

ATLANTA - For the first time since the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, more than a million Americans are believed to be living with the virus that causes AIDS, the government said Monday.

The latest estimate is both good and bad news — reflecting the success of drugs that keep more people alive and the failure of the government to "break the back" of the AIDS epidemic by its stated goal of 2005.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that between 1,039,000 and 1,185,000 people in the United States were living with HIV in December 2003. The previous estimate from 2002 showed that between 850,000 and 950,000 people had the AIDS 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 Center 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," 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. Then, Dr. Robert Janssen of the CDC pledged the government campaign would "break the back" of the epidemic.

CDC officials previously have said the country's HIV infection rate has been "relatively stable" and without change. As the National HIV Prevention Conference was set to begin this week, Valdiserri said no new infection data will be available until next year.

However, recent outbreaks of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases in major cities around the country offer a hint that new infections may be as high as 60,000 cases a year, rather than the government estimate of 40,000, said Dr. Carlos del Rio, an Emory University professor of medicine.

"The U.S. has had a clear failure in HIV prevention — I think the increase in prevalence is a reflection of that, of the poor job we do in HIV prevention," del Rio said.

He added that the higher number is not as surprising as why the country has not been able to curb new infections. He said the CDC hasn't been given adequate resources to tackle HIV prevention and that experts have focused too much on whether it's better to promote abstinence or condom use to stop the spread of the virus.

"We're debating too much what to do and are not doing enough," he said.

At the same time, reaching the 1 million mark is "a sign of both victory and failure," said Terje Anderson, executive director of the National Association of People Living With AIDS.

"Part of the reason the number is so big is we're not dying as before," he said. "But the other problem is we have not made a significant dent in new infections."

Estimating the number of Americans with HIV has always been a difficult task for health officials, but this year's figures are believed to be the most accurate ever thanks to wider case reporting.

In the 1990s, the CDC and other agencies generally agreed that between 600,000 and 900,000 people had the virus, according to the University of California-San Francisco's Center for HIV Information.

Previous estimates — as high as 1.5 million people — from the 1980s were later determined to be too high. For example, the CDC estimated in 1986 that between 1 million and 1.5 million people had HIV. In 1987, that was revised to 945,000 to 1.4 million and was refined in 1990 to 800,000 to 1.2 million.

The CDC's latest estimates indicate blacks account for 47 percent of HIV cases; gay and bisexual men make up 45 percent of those living with the virus that causes AIDS, the health agency believes.

In 2003, the rates of AIDS cases were 58 per 100,000 in the black population, 10 per 100,000 Hispanics, 6 per 100,000 whites, 8 per 100,000 American Indian/Alaska native population, and 4 per 100,000 Asian/Pacific Islanders.

The CDC also warned those demographics may soon change because heterosexual blacks, women and others infected after having high-risk sex (such as with someone with HIV, an injection-drug user or a man who has sex with other men) now account for a larger proportion of those living with HIV than those who are living with full-blown AIDS.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050613/...NlYwMlJVRPUCUl

Also, looking at the figures in the chart on that page, straight individuals are at a higher risk (almost 60% higher statistically) than gay individuals.

Regards,

Lee

[jIgG]

and I thought HIV doesn't exist it's just a myth :juggle:

Im assuming those rates are only from people who actually tested and found to be HIV+?

[BDBionic]

and I thought HIV doesn't exist it's just a myth :juggle:

Actually the "AIDS dissident" argument is quite a fascinating one. I dunno... from the intellectual standpoint, at least. I follow it quite closely and read a lot of writings by those labeled as "AIDS dissidents". Scientists, researchers and doctors who have unconventional views of HIV/AIDS and links between the two. Pretty much for the same reason I'm fascinated by neoconservative foreign policy papers. It's always interesting to read someone else's point of view and to study their arguments. Not necessarily to subscribe to them but just... to read em.

It's neat stuff.

[jIgG]

I don't really buy into huge conspiracies with thousands of people involved where not one person comes out to spill the beans.

Going the wrong way about killing the virus seems more plausible to me.

I too have read the "AIDS dissidents" things, admitedly not much, but it seems strange how they say only drug users aquire the virus, but if that were true then what about people who're not drug users?


And then we have the drug companies with the pretty people pitching toxic HIV drugs....

[Squirt]

and I thought HIV doesn't exist it's just a myth :juggle:

I'm always up for debate on conspiracy theories. It's entirely possible that AIDS was created to wipe out the African population so the white dominated South Africans could take over the continent. Our white society has done, continues to do, some deplorable things around the world to stay in power, no joke.

[jIgG]

nothing is impossible in this world
But how LIKELY is it for this to happen without someone blowing the whistle.

The Iraq war memos leaked, people were told who Deep Throat was long time ago, and many other proofs secrets don't exactly last a long time someone always blows the cover

So it's likely this may be the case, just as it is likely the loved ones of whoever might have created the virus could become affected by the virus themselves.

[Squirt]

nothing is impossible in this world
But how LIKELY is it for this to happen without someone blowing the whistle.

The Iraq war memos leaked, people were told who Deep Throat was long time ago, and many other proofs secrets don't exactly last a long time someone always blows the cover

So it's likely this may be the case, just as it is likely the loved ones of whoever might have created the virus could become affected by the virus themselves.

Yeah good points. The truth usually does come out over time. How many millions of pages of redacted government documents are in existance and what are they hiding?

The facts we do know is our government has created chemical and biological weapons.. those are proven facts. What all those weapons are and if they've been tested in secret is unknown.

Let's face it.. if a government body was testing AIDS as a biological weapon.. and it got out of hand and created a worldwide pandemic.. do you think anyone involved would want to come forward? hhmmmmm

[Tristin]

The government needs to get off it's "wait till your married" bullshit bandwagon and promote safe sex. Unitll that happens Aids will continue to be a problem.

[BDBionic]

Well in reading through the labelled-"dissident" literature, I don't see any whistleblower factor at all. I too agree with what JiG and Squirt have mentioned in that with a lot of conspiracy theories, they just seem implausible because eventually someone would up and say something.

But so-called AIDS dissidents aren't necessarily the people saying AIDS was created by the government or created to wipe out gays and blacks or that it's a profit-driven conspiracy on the part of the pharmaceuticals in cahoots with the gov't or anything like that.

That's not what the predominant "AIDS dissident" arguments talk about. Not at all.

Rather, they argue that there's no genuine scientific proof of a correlation between HIV and AIDS, much of mainstream science's views on HIV/AIDS is the result of people jumping on the bandwagon, flawed studies and conclusions early in the HIV/AIDS timeline, faulty science, so on. That people were so blinded by the shock of the initial outbreak, the desire to offer solutions and find treatments/cures that they neglected basic scientific principle, made poor judgements, and drew flawed conclusions that became accepted as fact. That the entire HIV/AIDS orthodox viewpoint is a circular logic rooted in early mistakes. The scientific community was too eager to accept early conclusions. They moved forward with those early conclusions being the basis of future perceptions, perspectives, research, etc. But those early conclusions were in fact wrong, all propogated by a cycle corrupted by its flawed origins.

So these "AIDS dissidents" aren't necessarily demonizing anyone or saying all scientists, doctors, researchers are engaged in a conspiracy. They're just saying they're going about it all wrong.

Some of the main points they tend to raise are...

1. "HIV tests" actually just being tests for antibodies and none of the tests that you or I can get at the local gay and lesbian center or from our doctor or whatever actually test for an actual virus. Just the antibodies. But we've come to accept the presence of an antibody equals the presence of the virus when, in fact, that's not been determined. It's just assumed because that's the standard.

2. Potential non-HIV causes of AIDS symptoms. AIDS isn't necessarily a disease in and of itself. It's a collection of diseases or conditions that, when appearing in a person who's tested positive for HIV antibodies, qualify as AIDS. Opportunistic infections (pneumonia, hepatitis, and others), high viral load, low cd4 and t-cell counts. But all of the conditions that qualify someone as having AIDS occur in non-HIV-positive people. It's just that when you get pneumonia when you have HIV, you have AIDS. When you get pneumonia when you don't have HIV, you have pneumonia. So again the correlation and relationship is more assumed through circular logic than independently and objectively sound. All kinds of conditions and illnesses absent HIV can cause high viral load and low tcell counts ("viral load" tests don't actually count isolated virus units. It's the result of a complicated numerical equation based on numbers of virus particles. Not whole virus units). So again, mainstream science is assuming too much. The HIV/AIDS relationship only makes sense when you accept what the AIDS dissidents view as flawed original conclusions.

3. HIV/AIDS medications may very well be responsible for alot of the health problems experienced by HIV/AIDS patients. Not out of kinda spite or evil intent to support the pharmaceuticals. But because, in a genuine effort to help, the medical community inadvertently creates the conditions that in turn end up requiring more effort to help.

4. Unsound decisions, definitions, designations by the CDC and other such bodies distort the facts and #'s involved (number of HIV infected individuals, new infections, what constitutes infection, what constitutes AIDS, so on)

5. The behavior of high risk groups (drug users, gay men) is just as likely to cause the kinds of conditions that would yield a positive HIV antibody test result (remember... the dissidents say that test itself is flawed) as they are to cause AIDS conditions. So is someone getting sick as a result of HIV/AIDS or is it the result of excessive drug use, exposure to other known bacterial and viral infections, so on?

6. Africa HIV/AIDS statistics are totally flawed and wrong. Subsaharan Africa - due to malnutrition, lack of sanitation, clean water, available healthcare, so on - would be experiencing all of the problems attributed to AIDS even without HIV. And that the HIV numbers from Africa are just bad estimates.

Anyways, I totally probably just hacked and massacred the HIV/AIDS dissident argument there.

But all that randomness aside, really my only point was that "AIDS dissident" doesn't necessarily mean they're talkin about some evil right wing conspiracy. There are many respected (or formerly respected before they spoke out with views against the mainstream thought) scientists and researches and doctors who are part of the so-called AIDS dissident movement.

They're not saying "It's all a conspiracy!!!!"

They're saying "Whoa... fellas... I think we got it wrong and so let's take a step back and rethink our approach to this whole thing."

Now, I'm not quite about to subscribe to the AIDS dissident point of view. Related to but not necessarily the "whistleblower" factor... you'd figure if mainstream science does really have it all wrong more experts would come to that realization. That's why I'm skeptic of the skeptics. That and the fact that they cite the same research over and over. Rather than come up with new references. Though at the same time, the dissidents address both of those problems I have with why I can't fully accept what they're saying. So who knows. haha.

But regardless... it's still fascinating to read through their papers, their points of view, and study their argument.

[Squirt]

I wonder if white caucasians in our Gay community will feel invinsible as only 6 out of 100,000 of us will get HIV where 58 of 100,000 african americans will get it ?