More Than One Million Americans Infected With AIDS

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Former president of United States of America, Bill Clinton addresses a meeting of the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS initiative assisting India's National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) in New Delhi on Thursday, May 26, 2005. Clinton announced that his Foundation's HIV/AIDS initiative and the Indian Government's NACO will train 150,000 private sector doctors in India in HIV/AIDS care and treatment over the next year. The Times Of India/ Amit Kumar.

Washington (AFP) Jun 14, 2005
More than a million Americans were infected with AIDS at the end of 2003, with black, homosexual and bi-sexual men making up the largest group among them, according to government statistics made public Monday.

African-Americans made up about 47 percent of this group, whites 34 percent, and Hispanics 17 percent, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released at a conference on HIV/AIDS being held in Atlanta, Georgia, June 12-15.

Asian-Americans, Indians and native residents of Alaska make up only one percent of this group.

Men accounted for 74 percent of those infected by the AIDS virus.

Homosexual men represented the largest group (45 percent), followed by those infected through high-risk heterosexual relations (27 percent) and drug addicts using syringes (22 percent).

The CDC also warned that demographic tendencies could soon change because heterosexual African-Americans, women and other individuals infected with the AIDS virus following high-risk sexual relations now represented a larger group of those carrying the virus than those who already have AIDS.

"While treatment advances have been an obvious godsend to those living with the disease, it presents new challenges for prevention" said Ronald Valdiserri, with the CDC's National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention.

One of the biggest challenges, he said, is to have the ability to test about 25 percent of HIV-positives in the United States, who still don't know they have been infected.

Valdiserri noted that the majority of new infections result from contacts with people, who still don't know they are carriers of the HIV virus.

However, there are encouraging signs on this front. The share of adults who take HIV tests during routine medical exams more than doubled between 1998 and 2002, according to a study presented at the conference by Dr. Joseph Inungu of Central Michigan University.

However, according to the CDC, remains at between 40,000 a year.

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Sth Africa's Health Min Tells AIDs Conference To Focus On Other Diseases

Durban, South Africa (AFP) Jun 07, 2005
South Africa's health minister angered AIDS activists on Tuesday when she told a national AIDS conference that they should focus on other diseases and reiterated her view that drugs were not the only answer to fighting HIV.

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