HIV prevalence estimates--United States, 2006

Abstract

Accurate and timely data on the number of persons in the United States living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection (HIV prevalence) are needed to guide planning for disease prevention, program evaluation, and resource allocation. However, overall HIV prevalence cannot be measured directly because a proportion of persons infected with HIV have neither been diagnosed nor reported to local surveillance programs. In addition, national HIV prevalence data are incomplete because local reporting systems for confidential, name-based HIV reporting have been fully implemented only since April 2008. With the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapies that delay the progression of HIV to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), and of AIDS to death, and changes in the AIDS case definition to include an immunologic diagnosis, earlier back-calculation methods from the 1990s for estimating HIV prevalence based on the number of reported AIDS cases are no longer reliable. With 80% of states reporting name-based HIV diagnoses as of January 2006, an extended back-calculation method now can be used to estimate HIV prevalence more accurately. Based on this method, CDC now estimates that 1.1 million adults and adolescents (prevalence rate: 447.8 per 100,000 population) were living with diagnosed or undiagnosed HIV infection in the United States at the end of 2006. The majority of those living with HIV were nonwhite (65.4%), and nearly half (48.1%) were men who have sex with men (MSM). The HIV prevalence rates for blacks (1,715.1 per 100,000) and Hispanics (585.3 per 100,000) were, respectively, 7.6 and 2.6 times the rate for whites (224.3 per 100,000).