HIV Epidemic: Rising at 8%/Year

David Virtue is reporting this story. We haven't followed the numbers for a while.  David reports a 2009 number from the CDC, to wit, that estimates are between 400K to 500K for men carrying the disease but still living.  Also, he reports that 600K men have died in the USA from AIDS/HIV, the result of unnatural events called sodomy.

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=16495

There is a shocking second HIV epidemic among U.S. gay men that no one is talking about. Some LGBT rights groups today are focused on topics that make for an easier sell to the rest of society than HIV/AIDS. Pop quiz, no cheating allowed: if you had to guess, would you say that HIV and AIDS rates among gay men in the United States are A) declining, B) remaining stable, or C) rising?

The correct answer is C) rising, at an alarming 8% per year. HIV incidence -- that is, the proportion of a population infected -- among gay men in the United States rises by that amount every year since at least 2001. Overall, this incidence, at 15.4% cumulatively, is just slightly lower than the incidence among gay men in Sub-Saharan Africa. And there's a good case to be made that the real numbers are actually higher; for instance, we know they're higher in some major metropolitan areas, where the incidence among MSM (men who have sex with men) is one in five. In San Francisco, it may be as high as one in four.

Overall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that between 400,000 and 500,000 gay men in the United States carried the virus in 2009, the most recent year for which data are available. Chillingly, gay and bisexual men are the only demographic to experience a rise in HIV infection rates.

These are astonishing facts. The AIDS epidemic is now over three decades old and has taken over 600,000 lives in the U.S. alone. That's more casualties than were seen in the entire Civil War. It's also noteworthy that new infections in the U.S. are numerically stable overall, at roughly 50,000 a year over the last decade or so -- a number seemingly impervious to public or private prevention efforts.

Considering the carnage AIDS has inflicted on gay men in particular, it's urgent that we examine what, if anything, can be done to save lives and to prevent the widespread damage of another generation -- today's young men. The less than 1% of Americans who are gay or bisexual men between the ages of 13 and 29 comprise 27% of new infections.