People who weren’t yet born when AIDS first emerged are now most at risk for becoming HIV positive, an alarming development that underscores the urgent need for education about this terrible disease—as Dec. 1, World AIDS Day, must remind us.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that the HIV incidence rate for Americans between 13 and 29 years old increased by about 21 percent between 2006 and 2009. In fact, most of the new HIV infections reported in the United States afflict people younger than 30.
Americans younger than 30 have never known a world without AIDS. Moreover, they’ve never really known a time when effective treatment for HIV and AIDS wasn’t available. It is imperative that everyone—especially everyone younger than 30—is acutely aware of AIDS and how to prevent contracting the disease.
Ignorance is perhaps the biggest challenge to surmount toward prevention. Unfortunately, AIDS is no longer front-page news, though it ought to be, three decades after it became the most threatening health problem in the United States. On this World AIDS Day, we must not forget that 56,000 people in the United States become infected with HIV each year, according to the CDC, and more than 14,000 AIDS victims die in this nation each year.
Thanks to improved treatments that have become more widely available, people in the United States who have HIV and AIDS have survived longer, in greater numbers, than did populations who contracted the disease decades ago. The CDC estimates the number of people infected nationwide exceeds 1 million. The regular testing of populations in the United States most at risk for HIV—and providing anti-retroviral drugs for HIV/AIDS patients—can dramatically reduce the incidence of new infections.
Preventing the spread of HIV is not a complicated process. First, anyone who is or has been sexually active—except in a monogamous relationship with a partner whose health status is certain—should be tested. Have safe sex or abstain. No one should illegally inject drugs, of course, but above all, under no circumstances should anyone share needles.
Using simple precautions and proven treatments, patients and their health-care providers can fight and manage the disease and slow its spread. But we can’t allow today’s more effective medicines to make us complacent or ambivalent about HIV/AIDS, or lessen our resolve to find a cure.
To learn more about the disease and prevention or to find a place get tested locally, visit actagainstaids.org.
Sam Ho is the chief medical officer of UnitedHealthcare, a health insurance and service provider. Send comments via the opinion editor at econnolly@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 1-8, 2011.