HIV Continues To Increase Among Young Gay Men In US
Despite decades of prevention efforts, HIV continues to increase
among young gay men in urban areas, and most of these men are unaware
they are infected, according to new data from the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC).
Researchers looked at survey data
spanning 1994 to 2008 on gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with
men ages 18 to 29 year old living in Baltimore, Los Angeles, Miami, New
York City and San Francisco, recruited from bars and nightclubs. The
study focused on HIV prevalence as well as HIV testing.
They found
that among those ages 23 to 29 years old, there was a trend towards
increasing HIV prevalence from 1994 to 2008, with an overall prevalence
of 16 percent.
“The
fact that new infections increased somewhat in the 23- to 29-year-old
age group indicates that this is a population that we need to be
extremely concerned about and that we really need to be trying to reach
them early with prevention so that we can establish healthy behaviors
early on,” said Dr. Alexa Oster, lead author of the study and medical
epidemiologist at the CDC.
Among gay men age 18 to 22, the overall
HIV prevalence was 11 percent, and this number remained steady over the
14-year time span of the study.
Why is there a lack of progress
in stemming the epidemic among young gay men? It turns out there are
many factors that lead to higher rates of HIV disease in the gay
community at large.
As Dr. Chris Beyrer, director of the Center
for Public Health and Human Rights at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School
of Public Health, explains, “there are structural, social and
biological features that enormously favor transmission over prevention
among men who have sex with men.”
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