The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services said the area that surrounds Los Angeles had registered a .05 percent rise in AIDS patients in 2002 over the previous year.

"Although the increase is small, it may well signal an end to the yearly decline in new AIDS cases we have been seeing since 1992, said the country's Director of Public Health, Doctor Jonathan Fielding.

The 2002 increase was only seen among men, whose annual number of cases rose by 1.6 percent, compared to a six percent drop in recorded female AIDS patients, he said.

The men were mostly white, or Asian-Pacific Islanders, the major ethnic or racial group that holds the United States' lowest AIDS rate.

The number of people in Los Angeles living with AIDS has doubled to more than 19,000 in 2002 since 1993. Some 25,000 to 35,000 other people have the HIV virus that can lead to AIDS.

Nationally, the United States has experienced a 17 percent rise in new HIV cases among homosexual men between 1999 and 2002, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

But, officials said, new and improved methods of tracking HIV and AIDS cases used by health officials could account for the rise in reported AIDS sufferers.

"Because the increase comes at a time when we have also increased our ability to detect new HIV and AIDS cases using laboratory reporting, it is too early to know if what we are seeing is a real increase or just a one-time anomaly due to the new expanded surveillance," said Gordon Bunch of the county's HIV-AIDS Epidemiology Program.

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