Statement by Robert Janssen, M.D. -- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

(BUSINESS WIRE)--In response to statements today by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, CDC provides the following important clarification and corrections regarding CDC’s 2006 HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report, published on March 26, 2008.

(http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/resources/reports/ 2006report/pdf/2006SurveillanceReport.pdf). (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.)

Every year, CDC issues an HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report that includes new data on HIV diagnoses and AIDS cases. These data do not include new HIV infections (incidence). The HIV diagnosis data included in the report only indicate when people were diagnosed, not when they were originally infected.

The “Commentary” section on page 6 of the 2006 report clearly explains and interprets these findings. In summary, the data show that from 2003 to 2006, the estimated number of HIV/AIDS cases in the 33 states and 5 areas with long-standing confidential name-based HIV reporting remained stable (in 2003 36,102 HIV diagnoses; in 2006, 36,817 diagnoses). This is clearly shown on Table 1 of the report.

The 2006 surveillance report does not show an increase in HIV/AIDS diagnoses. The higher number of reported HIV diagnoses in 2006 in Table 16 (52,878, compared to 35,537 in 2005 from Table 16 of the 2005 Surveillance Report) is due to the fact that this table includes data from states that have newly implemented confidential name-based HIV reporting as of 2006, including highly populous states like California, Illinois and Washington. HIV cases from these states have not been included in CDC surveillance reports in the past. The number of areas increased from 38 states and 5 dependent areas in 2005 to 45 states and 5 dependent areas in 2006.