By Daniel Bases
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Researchers have been undercounting new cases of
HIV infection in the United States, meaning the rate is probably 25 percent
higher at 50,000 people per year, the nation's top AIDS doctor said on
Tuesday.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases, said the rate of infection was not increasing but that
new methods of calculating the rate showed infections were more common than
previous estimates.
Fauci, attending the United Nations' 2008 High Level Meeting on AIDS, told
reporters the previous methods had shown the rate of new infections in the
United States had hit a plateau at around 40,000 per year for the past 14
years.
"They were counting the numbers in a way that was leaving out certain
segments of the society. So that 40,000 was probably an undercounted
number," he said.
Instead of using an extrapolated mathematical model to come up with the rate
of new infections, he said, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) was now relying on better counting of more groups,
households and regions.
"The number went up to about 50,000. That doesn't mean that the actual rate
of new infections increased. It means that we are now no longer missing
counting the ones that we missed early," Fauci said. "It was always 50,000 a
year."
The new counting methods are not changing the overall picture of AIDS in
America, Fauci said.
In the United States, with a population of about 300 million, some 1.1
million people are infected with HIV, of which 25 percent do not know it.
That leaves 770,000 documented cases.
"I have seen some of the data and it is clear. The confusion is that it was
increasing when in fact it is better accounting," Fauci said. "They are
counting more accurately."
AIDS activists have accused the CDC of holding back results from the new
methods but Fauci believes the statistics will become official "reasonably
soon, when the official publication comes out from the CDC."
Globally, an estimated 33.2 million people are infected with the human
immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS and 25 million have died so far from
the fatal and incurable disease.
Fauci said the search for a vaccine was complicated because unlike other
viruses that the human body can ultimately defend against, such as polio,
measles, mumps or smallpox, "the body does not do a good job making an
immune response to HIV."
On a positive note, drug therapy for treating HIV is proving effective in
slowing the disease.
"The good news is that the drugs we have now maintain people with
undetectable viruses -- present but undetectable for decades now," Fauci
said.
Fauci noted that the virus disproportionately affects blacks. While blacks
make up 12 percent of the U.S. population, 49 percent of new HIV infections
in men are among blacks and 65 percent of new infections in women are among
blacks.
(Editing by Maggie Fox and John O'Callaghan)
