HIV Transmission: Rate in US Is Approximately 4 Percent Per Year
AIDS
Weekly
March 1, 2004
More than 95
percent of HIV-infected people in the United States do not transmit the virus to
another individual in a year's time, according to a report by David Holtgrave,
PhD, of Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health. In his analysis of
the period 1978-2000, Holtgrave found that transmission rates dropped during the
1980s from essentially 100 percent to about 5.49 percent. The rate fell again
slightly at the beginning of the 1990s, then remained relatively stable at
4.0-4.34 percent.
This rate is
"rather surprisingly low," said Holtgrave. The drop "indicates a real success of
HIV prevention programs and may help to explain why the number of new HIV
infections has been rather stable at 40,000 infections per year for over a
decade."
But in what he
called a "potentially important insight," Holtgrave noted that "the closer the
transmission rate gets to 0 percent, the harder it will be to keep making
continual reductions."
While the rates
"likely will be approximately the same" in the next couple of years, "CDC has
noted that the number of HIV diagnoses in the US may be starting to rise again;
if this trend continues, eventually we could see the transmission rate start to
increase again," Holtgrave said. "But, we must keep in mind, the public health
goal is not to keep the transmission rate the same or let it increase. We must
find ways to decrease the transmission rate to even lower levels. Past HIV
prevention work has been successful but we have much work to do."
The full report, "Estimation of Annual HIV Transmission Rates in the United States, 1978-2000," was published in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes (2004;35(1):89-92).