US HIV Cases Up 50,000 in Year

The number of Americans diagnosed with HIV rose by 50,000 over the last 12 months, according to CDC estimates. The CDC's Dr. Harold Jaffe released the estimates over the weekend at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, a meeting of scientists and physicians involved in AIDS research.

According to Jaffe, the number of people who know their infection status must increase along with the number of infected people who receive treatment. Surveys show that HIV-infected Americans who use antivirus medications survive longer, steadily increasing the number of people living with HIV. The number of Americans who die of AIDS annually has remained for the last three years at about 3 of every 100 HIV-positive Americans.

These deaths, Jaffe argued, are primarily a result of the fact that "there's still a lot of people out there who are infected who are not accepting the health care system at all."

The focus of the conference will be on the African epidemic. The keynote address on Saturday by Microsoft's Bill Gates, whose foundation has donated hundred of millions of dollars to fighting AIDS in Africa, spoke to the inequities in the availability and production of AIDS drugs. Gates noted that nearly all medications are produced for and distributed to "the rich world." And, ". . . here you get to what has to be the biggest market failure of all time. . . . When the market doesn't work it needs government resources -- huge resources -- in the tens of billions of dollars."

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