Health Officials: HIV epidemic a crisis in U.S.

The HIV epidemic in the United States is a crisis, federal health officials told a House panel Tuesday, urging additional programs to specifically protect and educate African Americans, Latinos and gay and bisexual men -- the groups hardest hit by the virus that causes AIDS.

Their testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform came a little more than a month after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study indicating that new HIV infections in the United States had been underestimated by 40% every year for more than a decade. The study concluded that there are about 56,300 new infections each year, not the 40,000 usually cited.

"We need to do so much more than we're doing right now," said Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the CDC. "And we need to get AIDS back on the radar screen. We need to highlight the fact that this isn't just something that happens underground. This is something that is still posing a threat to college students and to young men and women across our nation's fabric."

The new numbers, published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., were found through improved testing and were not an actual increase in new infections, which have remained relatively constant since the late 1990s.

The higher estimates, however, served as a reminder that preventing transmission of the human immunodeficiency virus is still an issue in the United States, where the prevalence of HIV is greater than in Canada, Australia, Japan or any Western European country except Switzerland.

— Full LA Times Story