Day 265: Wasn’t this news released last December?

I am never opposed to more press coverage of HIV, but the big story today seems to be an old one. The CDC reports that instead of the approximately 40,000 new HIV infections in the U.S every year, in 2006 we actually had about 56,000 new infections. That’s a huge difference. They used a new surveillance method to come up with this number.

 

As you may note (as carried in this blog), the same data were released on World AIDS Day last year. The Wall Street Journal reported then that the U.S. incidence was about 60,000.  The CDC is saying this is a wake-up call—but the wake-up call should have been (at least) 8 months ago! Well, we’ve never done enough on HIV, and I don’t think the increased U.S. incidence estimates will do anything to change that. Should we start taking bets on whether HIV gets any debate time in the upcoming elections?

 

M. Linde