HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report: U.S. HIV and AIDS cases reported through June 1996

Details

• Alternative Title:
  HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report; Mid-year Edition, Vol. 8, No. 1: U.S. HIV and AIDS cases reported through June 1996
• Corporate Authors:
  National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention (U.S.). Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention.
• Description:
  This edition of the HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report includes cases of HIV infection and AIDS reported to state, local, and territorial health departments through June 1996. The publication of this edition coincides with the fifteenth anniversary of the first published report of unusual cases of Pneumocystis pneumonia among young homosexual men in Los Angeles, California. Following that report in 1981, active surveillance was initiated for cases of an acquired immune deficiency syndrome that came to be known as AIDS. During the first 15 years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States, regular publication of AIDS surveillance data has tracked the distribution of disease throughout the population. Through June 1996, 548,102 men, women, and children with AIDS have been reported to CDC, and 343,000 have died (Tables 3 and 9). Over 80,000 persons have been reported with HIV infection (not AIDS) in the 28 states that also conduct surveillance for HIV cases (Table 16).
  
  Three methods used to track the course of the epidemic are presented in this report. In the first method, AIDS cases reported to CDC each year are presented for the one or two most recent annual periods and/or cumulatively (Tables 1- 8 and Figures 1-5). Reported cases represent the scope and magnitude of the epidemic and are useful for characterizing the demographic, geographic, and risk/ exposure distributions in the population. Because health departments actively solicit AIDS case reports from providers and medical facilities throughout the United States and submit them promptly to CDC, numbers and characteristics of reported cases are useful for planning and allocating resources for prevention and care. In the second method, the numbers of new diagnoses of severe HIV-related illnesses (AIDS opportunistic infections [AIDSOIs]) are estimated for each year from 1990 through 1995 (Tables 13-15). These data are useful for tracking the recent course of the epidemic. They are estimated rather than counted for several reasons: to adjust for temporal lags between when an AIDS case is diagnosed and when the case report will be received by the health department, to adjust for recent fluctuations in case reporting caused by the expansion of the AIDS surveillance case definition in 1993, and to account for delays in obtaining complete risk/ exposure data on the most recently reported cases (see Technical Notes). The third method counts reported deaths among persons with AIDS (Table 9).
  
  In addition, this report presents reported cases of HIV infection (Tables 16-21). From July 1995 through June 1996, the 26 states that report both adult/adolescent (13 years or older) and pediatric HIV cases, reported nearly 18,000 AIDS cases and over 14,000 HIV cases (Table 16). HIV reports represent only those HIV-infected persons who have been tested by a provider and do not include persons who were tested anonymously or whose infection is unrecognized. These data, however, describe persons at an earlier stage of disease and enhance the completeness and usefulness of AIDS surveillance data in describing the impact and characteristics of the epidemic in these states (see Technical Notes). Table 22 presents the minimum number of persons living with HIV infection (not AIDS) or with AIDS (over 275,000).
  
  Five states continue to account for over half of the cumulative AIDS case reports (New York, California, Florida, Texas, New Jersey); they held the same ranking in the last 12-month period (Table 1). However, rates of reported cases per 100,000 population were highest in New York, Puerto Rico, Florida, and New Jersey. Some of the highest rates of reported cases are also found in large metropolitan areas (more than 500,000 population) in these same states (e.g., New York, San Francisco, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Jersey City, and Newark—Table 2). Fluctuations in reported cases per 100,000 population during the last several annual periods reflect changing surveillance practices following the 1993 change in the AIDS case definition. The rate for the District of Columbia is artifactually high because the District represents a small geographic area (Table 1); the impact of the epidemic in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area is comparable to that in areas with moderate-to-high rates (Table 2).
  
  Among adults and adolescents, three HIV exposure categories continue to account for nearly all cases of AIDS: men who have sex with men (51 percent), injecting drug use (25 percent), and heterosexual contact with a person who is in a high-risk group or has HIV/AIDS (8 percent— Table 3). Of the 7,296 AIDS cases reported among children, 90 percent resulted from transmission from mother to child (Table 3). These data continue to highlight the need for prevention and therapeutic interventions to reduce transmission in these populations.
  
  In tables 13-15, recent trends in the number of estimated AIDS-OIs illustrate the overall slowing in the rate of growth of the AIDS epidemic. From 1992 through 1995, the estimates of newly diagnosed AIDS-OIs suggest that AIDS cases were increasing at a rate of 5 percent or less per year in the United States as a whole compared to higher rates of increase from 1990 through 1992. As the epidemic of HIV infection has dispersed from the cities where AIDS cases were first recognized in 1981 (Los Angeles and New York), different populations and geographic areas have been affected over time. Changes in the number of estimated AIDS-OIs during 1992-1995 reflect these different stages in the maturation of the epidemic: leveling in the West but continued increases in other geographic areas (Table 13), leveling among whites but continued increases among blacks and Hispanics (Table 14), a stable trend among men largely caused by the leveling of AIDS-OIs among men who have sex with men (Table 15), and an upward trend among women reflecting increasing numbers of women who were infected with HIV through sexual contact, principally with injecting drug-using partners, and who are now progressing to AIDS (Table 15). Despite the large number of women with HIV infection or AIDS, a gradual decrease in pediatric AIDS cases has occurred (Table 15). Thus, while the number of estimated AIDS-OIs in the United States is still increasing slightly each year, declines in infants and men who have sex with men likely reflect successful prevention interventions.
  
  It is likely that, in the near future, these trends will continue and numbers of estimated AIDS-OIs will stabilize or decline slightly. However, these overall trends at the national level are likely to mask diverse local sub-epidemics. In the future, the number of AIDS-OIs and the course of the epidemic will be determined by the effectiveness of behavioral intervention programs in preventing new infections, prompt diagnosis of HIV infection, the availability and effectiveness of new therapies directed at slowing progression to AIDS in recently infected persons, and the degree to which recommendations for the prevention of perinatal transmission are adopted and implemented.
  
  
• Content Notes:
  Publication date approximated.
• Subjects:
  Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome / Epidemiology Data Interpretation, Statistical Epidemics Epidemiological Monitoring HIV Public Health Surveillance Statistics Tables
• Keywords:
  DHP_HIV_Reports
• Series:
  HIV Surveillance Report
• Publisher:
  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (U.S.)
• Document Type:
  Journal Issue
• Genre:
  Statistics
• Place as Subject:
  United States
• Rights:
  Public Domain
• CIO:
  National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention (NCHSTP)
• Division:
  DHP - Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention
• Topic:
  Diseases & Conditions
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  33 pdf pages
• Volume:
  8
• Issue:
  1
• Citation:
  Suggested Citation: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report, 1996;8(no.1):[inclusive page numbers].
• Collection(s):
  Infectious Diseases
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:dcf8c3b802fbbce47ff3be768c675ac0dca061bc99391bdf4df99d706c01c2d67c0405c896199b70bc1a59cee56a52464e25a67c03bdb12990a0dcd0d02954da
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/34402/cdc_34402_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 537.12 KB ]