Monday, December 1, 2008

Men's HIV/AIDS Epidemic: It's Back Complacency Fuels Rising HIV Rate in Men Who Have Sex With Men

The warning comes from three of the researchers who led the CDC's HIV/AIDS efforts in the first two decades of the AIDS epidemic. Lead study author Harold W. Jaffe, MD, was director of the CDC's National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention and now heads the department of public health at England's Oxford University.

"'Silence equals death' may unfortunately be regaining relevance for some men who have sex with men," Jaffe and colleagues write in the Nov. 28 issue of TheJournal of the American Medical Association.

That's not to say HIV infection is still the death sentence it was in the mid-1980s. It isn't. And that may be part of the problem. HIV drugs can postpone AIDS for decades. This means the current generation has not had the personal experience of their older gay brethren, who saw HIV devastate their friends and lovers.

"HIV treatment is so widely implemented in developed countries, I think people have begun to feel there is nothing to worry about. That is clearly not the case," Jaffe tells WebMD.

CDC outreach studies suggest that 10% of 15- to 29-year-old men who have sex with men are infected with HIV. More than two-thirds of these men don't know they're infected. And nearly 60% of the men who didn't know they were infected thought they were at low risk.

"These men may not literally be putting their lives at risk. But they are looking at a very serious illness, one that is going to be with them for the rest of their lives," Jaffe says. "You are talking about people having to take drugs for the rest of their lives -- drugs that have significant side effects. It is not acceptable to say, 'I will be infected, but so what?'"

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