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7月29日阅读,华盛顿邮报~
A Growth in AIDS Cases
2.2% rise is first in U.S. since 1993
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The Washington Post
July 29, 2003
The number of new AIDS cases in the United States appears to have begun to rise for the first time in 10 years, U.S. health officials reported Monday.
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 centers, the increase could mark a disturbing turning point in the AIDS epidemic in the United States. The epidemic had appeared to be stabilizing because of decades of intensive safe-sex campaigns and the introduction of powerful anti-viral drugs.
The overall increase could be driven by a rise in new HIV infections. 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, and 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 centers' 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.
"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 anymore. 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."
No parallel increase in HIV infections has been detected in any other groups, Jaffe said. According to the analysis, the number of new AIDS cases increased to 42,136 in 2002 from 41,227 in 2001 -- a 2.2 percent increase. The numbers had declined every year since 1993, when cases peaked at 80,010
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long arm of coincidence here~
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2003-07-29 18:21:24
