Results tagged “prevalence” from AIDS & HIV

The numbers of new infections of HIV and AIDS patients in Japan hit record highs in 2006, the Health Ministry said Wednesday, underscoring concerns over spreading infections.

The number of new HIV infections last year was 914, up nearly 10 percent from 2005, according to preliminary data released by the ministry's AIDS Surveillance Committee.

The number of those who developed AIDS in 2006 was 390, up 6.3 percent from the year before.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - AIDS is not the bad word it used to be in Broward County, Fla.'s black neighborhoods.

Once such a taboo subject that many black people would not acknowledge the health crisis in their communities, AIDS and the virus that can lead to it, HIV, now are important topics in an important black institution: the church.

Black preachers are breaking the silence, calling from the pulpit for abstinence and AIDS testing. Health workers say it has made people more receptive to awareness campaigns.

Those efforts have helped lead to a decline in the number of new infections, Broward health officials said.

In the United States, the HIV/AIDS epidemic is a health crisis for African Americans. At all stages of HIV/AIDS—from infection with HIV to death with AIDS—African Americans are disproportionately affected compared with members of other races and ethnicities [1, 2].

STATISTICS

HIV/AIDS in 2005

• According to the 2000 census, African Americans make up approximately 13% of the US population. However, in 2005, African Americans accounted for 18,510 (49%) of the estimated 38,096 new HIV/AIDS diagnoses in the United States in the 33 states with long-term, confidential name-based HIV reporting [2].*
• Of all African American men living with HIV/AIDS, the primary transmission category was sexual contact with other men, followed by injection drug use and high-risk heterosexual contact [2].
• Of all African American women living with HIV/AIDS, the primary transmission category was high-risk heterosexual contact, followed by injection drug use [2].
• Of the estimated 141 infants perinatally infected with HIV, 91 (65%) were African American (CDC, HIV/AIDS Reporting System, unpublished data, December 2006).
• Of the estimated 18,849 people under the age of 25 whose diagnosis of HIV/AIDS was made during 2001–2004 in the 33 states with HIV reporting, 11,554 (61%) were African American [3].

by Peter Tremblay

Is AIDS an "accident of nature", or bio-terrorism created by a hideous intelligence? The cure to the worsening AIDS pandemic may lie in appreciating its origins. Are we as human beings, still such a self-destructive and barbaric species, that individuals or groups among us, would resort to such a prospective Crime Against Humanity?

Let's hope not, but a growing constituency of doctors as well as scientists are expressing alarm at statistics which suggest that AIDS is a "bio-weapon" designed to target population groups.

A striking feature of AIDS is that it has ethno-selective characteristics. The rate of infection is twice as high among Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans as among whites, with death coming two to three times as swiftly. And over 80% of the children with AIDS and 90% of infants born with it are among these minorities. "Ethnic weapons" that would strike certain racial groups more heavily than others have been a long-standing objectives of eugenics movements. (See - A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare by R. Harris and J. Paxman, p 265, Hill and Wang).

While the nation's rate of HIV disease has largely stabilized, HIV/AIDS is still a growing epidemic in this state. The AIDS case rate in North Carolina rose 60 percent between 2000 and 2004, compared with a 4 percent increase nationally.

Here are some facts about the disease in North Carolina in 2005:

• The overall HIV disease infection rate in the state was 21.1 cases per 100,000 residents. That translates to an estimated 29,500 residents with either HIV or AIDS, including people who are not aware they are infected.
• New HIV/AIDS infections were diagnosed in 1,806 people.
• The rate for blacks was seven times the rate for whites, at 61.4 cases per 100,000 compared with 8.6 per 100,000.
• The highest rate of infection was among black males, with 88.6 cases per 100,000.

source - N.C. Department of Health and Human Services

By Raymond S. Blanks, The Washington Post

The promises made by former mayor Anthony A. Williams more than a year ago to bolster the battle against HIV have not been realized.

The HIV-AIDS epidemic in the District remains disturbing and depressing. The rate of infection remains 10 times the national rate. African American women make up 90 percent of all infected female residents, and many thousands of residents with HIV do not know their status.

Black residents make up 60 percent of the District's population but represent more than 80 percent of AIDS cases. Nearly 20,000 of the city's residents are living with HIV. Recent tests indicate that, among the 16,700 persons tested, 580 tested positive, a new increase of nearly 4 percent.

Youngsters in western China know more than their parents about how HIV and AIDS are spread, but they still lag well behind their peers in more developed parts of the country, a recent survey suggests.

The survey found 73.3 percent of youth in western China know how the HIV virus is spread and what they can do to protect themselves. That is about 20 percent points lower than youth in the rest of the country.

Many young people in the west know the HIV virus can be contracted through unprotected sex and blood transmission, according to the survey, which was published by China's Juvenile Research Center and the National Research Center for Science and Technology for Development.

By Jose Antonio Vargas, Washington Post

In late August, barely a month into her new job, Marie Sansone of the District's AIDS agency was astounded by what she discovered: five boxes of unexamined HIV and AIDS cases that had not been touched in more than a year.

In the boxes were records of 2,000 to 3,000 cases that had yet to be entered in the city's database. The records are mostly from 2004 and 2005, some from 2003. Who's getting sicker, who needs treatment, who died. All boxed up.

"Oh, my goodness," Sansone, surveillance chief for the city's Administration for HIV Policy and Programs (AHPP), remembers saying.

 

Hong Kong is urging residents who have had unsafe sex to undergo HIV tests after it found two large clusters of new infections that point to an unparalleled fast and local spread of the virus in the city.

"This is a fast spread in a place with low HIV prevalence. We have never seen this before," Wong Ka-hing, a consultant for the Health Department's Special Preventive Program, said in an interview on Thursday.

The two clusters involve 46 men, but authorities have not ruled out the chance of more people, including women, being infected.

The men were diagnosed with HIV between November 2003 and September 2006. Their virus samples were so genetically similar that local scientists believe they probably passed the virus to one another.

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. In the 25 years since the U-S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified AIDS, misconceptions still surround the disease in Tennessee.

Many people still associate H-I-V and AIDS with gay white men, but in Hamilton County last year, 51 percent of all reported cases of H-I-V were blacks.

Increasingly, AIDS sufferers also include Hispanics, women and children.Meantime, misconceptions persist about how someone can become infected with H-I-V.

Some youngsters still think you can get H-I-V from mosquitoes or from sitting on a toilet seat.

Copyright 2006 Associated Press

Recent data by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and Aids (UNAids) on the decline of infections may have been inaccurate, a workshop was told.

It was noted that many Kenyans do not fight the scourge either due to religious reasons or cultural practices and beliefs.

The National Muslim Council of Women of Kenya (NMCWK) chairperson, Ms Nazlin Omar, said her organisation was training Muslim leaders on attitude change of the Muslim community.

JOHANNESBURG - South Africa, which has the world's second heaviest caseload of HIV/Aids, has seen average life expectancy fall by 13 years since 1990 to 51, a new study shows.

A survey by the Medical Research Council and Actuarial Society of South Africa revealed that life expectancy this year was "estimated to be 49 years for males and 53 years for females" or an average of 51.

"By 2005, the HIV/Aids pandemic had already taken about 13 years off life expectancy," the report stated.

Researcher Debbie Bradshaw said life expectancy in South Africa in 1990 was 64 years, but had dropped to 51.

by Iris Phillips, 100 mile Free Press, Canada

Dec. 1, was World AIDS Day but somehow I missed hearing about it or if I did I just didn’t pay attention.

I did spend a bit of time tracking the happenings of the Liberal Leadership Convention. Somehow it’s like watching the history of our country unfold right before our eyes. Fascinating stuff.

So somehow World AIDS Day just passed me by.

And to be honest, does it really matter?

You never hear much about AIDS anymore. It seems like the big scare of an AIDS pandemic never materialized. Isn’t there treatment now anyways?

In September 2006, CDC published revised recommendations for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) testing in health-care settings to 1) increase early detection of HIV infection by expanding HIV screening of patients and 2) improve access to HIV care and prevention services (e.g., by conducting screening in locations such as emergency departments and urgent-care facilities, where persons who do not otherwise access HIV testing seek health-care services) (1).

HIV screening is now recommended for patients aged 13--64 years in all health-care settings after patients are notified that testing will be performed unless they decline (opt-out screening). This represents a substantial change from earlier recommendations to 1) offer HIV testing routinely to all patients only in health-care settings with high HIV prevalence and 2) conduct targeted screening on the basis of risk behaviors for patients in low-prevalence settings (2). This report examines HIV and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) case reporting in South Carolina before the 2006 recommendations were published.

BEIJING (AFP) - A leading Chinese AIDS activist recently detained by police has said the number of people suffering from the disease in China could be 10 times higher than official estimates.

Veteran AIDS activist Wan Yanhai also said Thursday authorities detained him and banned a conference he organized because the government was nervous about being held responsible by sufferers over their infections from public hospitals.

China's health ministry said last week that 183,733 people were confirmed with HIV/AIDS at the end of October, a 27.5 percent rise from the end of last year.

MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia has registered over 363,000 people living with HIV-AIDS, including 2,322 children, chief medical doctor Gennady Onishchenko said, a news agency has reported.

Just under half of the HIV-positive children, 1,059, were infected before birth by their mothers, Onishchenko was quoted as saying by RIA Novosti.

He also said 27,250 new cases of HIV infection had been registered since the start of the year.

"Nearly 60 percent of the infections are concentrated in 13 Russian regions, particularly Sverdlovsk, Moscow, Samara and Irkutsk, as well as the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg," Onishchenko said, ITAR-TASS reported.

MANILA, Nov. 30 (Xinhua) -- The World Health Organization (WHO)warned here on Thursday that the HIV/AIDS situation in Asia will further worsen unless political leaders meet their promises to step up efforts to stop the virus from spreading.

"The number of people living with HIV continues to grow," WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific Shigeru Omi said in a report issued by the international health body.

"High-risk behavior, such as injecting drug use, unprotected paid sex and unprotected sex between men, is especially evident in the HIV epidemics in some regions, including Asia," he added.

HIV infection remains of major public health importance in Europe, with evidence of increasing transmission of HIV in many European countries. In 2005, 77,553 newly diagnosed cases of HIV infection (104 per million population) were reported from 48 of the 52 countries in the European Region of the World Health Organization (major exceptions being Italy, Norway and Spain) and 8,346 cases of AIDS diagnosed (12/million) in 47 countries (major exceptions being the Norway, Russian Federation and Ukraine). In comparison to previous years, the number of newly diagnosed cases of HIV infection reported in 2005 has continued to increase and the number of diagnosed AIDS cases continued to decline.

LONDON (Reuters) - The number of people in Britain living with HIV has grown to an estimated 63,500 adults as sufferers live longer and new infections continue to rise, according to a report on Wednesday.

That figure is an increase from 58,300 in 2004, the Health Protection Agency (HPA) report says, and includes both those who have been diagnosed and also around a third (20,100) who remain unaware of their infection.

The report called A Complex Picture is being launched ahead of World AIDS Day on December 1.

Dr Valerie Delpech, an HIV expert at the agency said: "We are seeing an ever increasing pool of people living with HIV and AIDS in the UK.

BEIJING (AFP) - China is experiencing a surge in the number of new HIV/AIDS infections as the virus spreads from high-risk groups to the general public.

There were 183,733 people confirmed with HIV/AIDS at the end of October, the health ministry said on its website, with the state-run press reporting the number was 27.5 percent higher than at the end of 2005.

The ministry did not provide comparative figures, but Xinhua news agency said there were 39,644 extra confirmed cases of HIV/AIDS in China in the first 10 months of the year, compared with a total of 144,089 at the end of 2005.