Special Report: HIV Prevention at 25 Years: HIV prevention over past 25 years had early successes, now treads water.

Publication: AIDS Alert

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COPYRIGHT 2006 A Thomson Healthcare Company

Special Report: HIV Prevention at 25 Years

HIV prevention over past 25 years had early successes, now treads water

Progress made fast and early on

When money and time are put into HIV prevention efforts, they can have a dramatic impact, and the United States is a good example of this. But the reverse also is true, HIV prevention experts say.

Prevention programs dropped new infections from 160,000 a year in the mid-1980s to 40,000 a year since 1990, says David Holtgrave, PhD, a professor and chair in the department of health, behavior and society in the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

A study Holtgrave co-authored estimated that without HIV prevention investments totaling more than $10.1 billion from the early 1980s to 2000, there would have been an additional 204,000 to 1.585 million HIV infections in the United States.1

That's the good news. The flip side of the coin is that the prevention work and research funded by the CDC and state and local prevention spending have not resulted in any further reduction in HIV infections nationwide in 16 years. This is despite the CDC's well-publicized prevention goal of 2001 to cut new HIV infections in half to 20,000 a year by 2005.

The nation's prevention strategy problems were highlighted last year when the U.S. failed to make progress toward the CDC's 2005 goal, says David Satcher, MD, PhD, former U.S. Surgeon General and interim...

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