SUMMARY: Fifty-eight percent of gay 20-year-olds in the
Western world will be HIV-positive by the time they are 60 if current trends hold, a new study asserts.
Yahoo! News, Friday, August 18, 2006 — HIV prevalence is set to skyrocket among gay men in the Western world as they age, a University of Pittsburgh researcher said Thursday at the international AIDS conference in Toronto.
The Pittsburgh study, a review of papers published in journals, indicates that the number of new cases of HIV has been rising by about 1.9 percent each year since 2001, meaning that as gay men as a group get older, more and more of them will become HIV-positive, Agence-France Presse reported.
"Ongoing incidence rates at this level will yield very high HIV prevalence rates within each generation of gay men," University of Pittsburgh researcher Ron Stall told AFP.
Although only one in 12 gay men age 20 was HIV-positive in North America and Europe in 2001, Stall and other researchers project that the rate could rise to one in four by the time they turn 30. At age 60, the projections suggest that 58 percent of the men could be infected.
The numbers are more dire for gay men of color. Four percent of them between the ages of 15 and 22 are currently infected, while 15 percent between the ages of 23 and 29 are infected.
At an average 4 percent annual rate of increase in new infections, three-quarters of black gay men who are now 23-29 will be HIV-positive by the time they are 50.
"It's not a new story; it has been repeated time and again in the literature in the past … an almost unbelievable incidence rate," Stall said to AFP. "African-American men who have sex with men suffer among the highest HIV prevalence rates of any risk group in the world."
The report's findings only underscore the need for better ways of preventing HIV infection, instead of just treating its effects.
"HIV is still an incurable disease," Ronald Valdiserri, deputy director of the National Center for HIV at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told AFP. "In the United States, 5 percent (of the budget for HIV) is spent on prevention."
He added: "America is more interested on treating this disease than preventing it. We can't treat our way out of this epidemic, even as a rich country."
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