AIDS Cases Drop Again in New York City

In a sign of progress against one of the great plagues of the last generation, a dwindling number of New York City AIDS cases has been diagnosed over the last eight years, according to new statistics released on Friday.

The number of adults with newly diagnosed AIDS dropped to 2,225 in the 2011 fiscal year, which ended on June 30. That total was 25 percent lower than the total for the year before (2,969 new diagnoses), and 47 percent lower than in the 2003 fiscal year, when there were 4,164 new cases, according to the Mayor’s Management Report, which was released on Friday.

Dr. Monica Sweeney, assistant commissioner of the Bureau of H.I.V. Prevention and Control of the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said the decline was a “proxy for improved care.”

“It’s not that people are not infected” with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, she said. “It is that they are taking medications, they’re able to be more adherent, treatment has become easier.”

But she added that the number of newly diagnosed cases with H.I.V. has also been going down, though those numbers were not included in the report.

New infections were most common among men under 30, especially black and Latino men, who have sex with men; black women; and to a lesser extent Latina women, she said.

On the other hand, Dr. Sweeney said, because of programs directed at pregnant women and drug users, it is rare for babies to be born infected, and “people getting infected from intravenous drug use has gone from the thousands to 185” in 2009, the last year of complete data available.

The historic numbers tell a striking tale of an epidemic that crested and then began to fall as the means of transmission became better understood and drug treatment was simplified from a handful of pills to a single capsule containing three medications.

City charts show 52 new diagnoses of AIDS before 1981, rising to 160 in 1981, 540 in 1982, 1,097 in 1983 and then soaring to a peak of 12,745 in 1993 before beginning a gradual decline to the present levels.

SOURCE: The New York Times

The Friends of AIDS Foundation is dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for HIV positive individuals and empowering people to make healthy choices to prevent the spread of the HIV virus. To learn more about The Friends of AIDS Foundation, please visit: http://www.friendsofaids.org.

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