CDC Unveils Data System for HIV Cases

[newyawker99]

The government is unveiling a new surveillance system to better track HIV infections, scrapping an existing method that doesn't indicate how recently patients were infected.

The new system no longer relies on AIDS cases data submitted by state health departments - half of which don't report those cases because of privacy laws - but on anonymous data from 35 sites around the country to create a nationally representative snapshot of new infections by the virus, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Federal health officials also will now use two antibody tests that indicate whether a patient had been infected in the last six months. With some HIV-infected people living for more than a decade without developing AIDS, the old method did not reflect recent HIV infection trends.

"The new system applies this technology and allows us to distinguish a new infection from an old infection," said Dr. Ronald Valdiserri, deputy director of the CDC's National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention. "It gets at the question everyone wants answered, which is how many new cases of HIV are occurring."


HIV