New HIV infections continue to rise among gay Hispanic men

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Sunday announced that even though HIV diagnoses have declined by almost 20 percent over the past decade, gay and bisexual men, particularly men of color, are not seeing similar success.

It further reveals that 2.1 percent of Gambian women and 1.7 percent of male are HIV positive.

Dramatic declines were seen among heterosexuals (down 35%), people who inject drugs (63%) and African Americans, driven by a steep decline (42%) among black women.

According to the new government report, there has been a 22% increase in new diagnoses among black gay and bisexual men, but this number has leveled off since 2010.

Because HIV testing rates have been stable for gay Latino men since at least 2005, the CDC thinks that the increase in diagnoses reflect an increase in infections. For that group’s younger men, who used to have had disturbing infection rates, new diagnoses have shown a 2% drop.

The near-stabilization of new infection rates among gay and bisexual men provided a reason for hope, Jonathan Mermin, the director of the CDC’s National Center of HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention, said Sunday, the AP reported.

“Much more must be carried out to reduce new infections and to rescind the increases among Latino guys”.

Of those men, about 69 percent were not virally suppressed, meaning there are detectable levels of HIV in their blood and that increases the risk of transmitting the virus to someone else through unprotected sex and other forms of exposure. “Thus, we need to make sure our HIV prevention strategies are specifically reaching out to those individuals”.

The 90-90-90 is an ambitious treatment target set by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) to ensure that, by 2020, 90 percent of all people living with HIV will know their status; 90 percent of all people diagnosed with HIV shall receive sustained antiretroviral therapy; and 90 percent of all people receiving antiretroviral therapy will have viral suppression.

Black YMSM are disproportionately affected, accounting for 61% of all new HIV infections in the U.S. in 2009.

Eugene McCray, director of the CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, says that Americans “are now equipped with major prevention and treatment advances – so we know what works”.

“We have the tools to stop HIV right now”.

“This is the only way the country can ensure that people living with HIV enjoy healthy, productive, dignified social lives and reduce chances of infecting their partners or children” said the President of Resident Doctors in the Federal Capital Territory, Dr Isaac Olubanjo Akerele.

In results presented today at the 2015 National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta, the CDC showed that more healthcare providers are aware of Gilead’s anti-HIV drug known as Truvada, which is used as pre-exposure prophylaxis – or PrEP – and can prevent uninfected people from becoming infected.