Petrelis Files

Annual Transmission Rates
per 100 Persons Living with HIV, 1977–2006
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
December 8, 2008

CDC: Dramatic Declines Indicate Success
in U.S. HIV Prevention

If you're like me, you missed a significant report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing big drops in HIV infection stats. The federal agency also included helpful visual tools, two graphs, illustrating the positive news about falling transmission rates. How the heck did this incredible report fail to garner any media attention, issued one week after World AIDS Day? I Googled for any straight or gay media mention of the report, and checked for blogosphere attention of it, and found references only on CDC and HHS web sites.

To my thinking, the great news contained in the report should have been embraced and promoted not just by HIV/AIDS groups, but also gay advocacy organizations. Not just because we all can always use good news about HIV in the USA, but the gay community, after the tragic loss of gay marriage in California and the passage of Prop 8, really could have used the CDC report to pat ourselves on the back for enormously reducing new HIV cases.

I must also point out that the CDC acts as if it fear-driven prevention programs targeting gay men are the big reason behind the dramatic drop. So much effective HIV prevention among gay pozzies is because of community-created and promoted practices such as serosorting, which the federal agencies and many nonprofits don't encourage.

There is something wrong with America's approach to combating HIV/AIDS when an important study showing laudalbe drops in new transmissions from the CDC is quietly released, then generates no media, nonprofit or community attention. What's so bad about dramatic declines of HIV in America?

From the CDC, emphases mine:

To understand the impact of prevention efforts on the US HIV epidemic, Johns Hopkins researcher Dr. David Holtgrave conducted an analysis designed to measure the annual rate of HIV transmission in the United States. Dr. Holtgrave worked with CDC researchers to apply the latest annual data on new HIV infections in the United States to this analysis. The resulting measure, the transmission rate, represents the annual number of new HIV infections transmitted per 100 persons living with HIV. It is calculated by dividing HIV incidence for a given year by HIV prevalence for the same year, and multiplying this number by 100.

Put simply, the transmission rate compares the annual number of new infections to the number of persons living with HIV, and indicates the likelihood that an HIV infected individual will transmit HIV to others. In this way, it provides a better means to assess the effects of public health efforts to promote changes in risk behavior as well as the preventive effects of HIV diagnosis and treatment. ...

Since the peak level of new infections in the mid-1980s, just prior to the introduction of HIV testing, the transmission rate has declined by approximately 89 percent (from 44 transmissions per 100 persons living with HIV in 1984 to five transmissions per 100 persons living with HIV in 2006).

Over the last decade, as prevention efforts have been expanded and improved treatments for HIV became available, the transmission rate has declined by 33 percent (from an estimated eight transmissions per 100 persons living with HIV in 1997 to five in 2006).

Five transmissions per 100 persons living with HIV in 2006 means more than 95 percent of persons living with HIV did not transmit the infection that year.