HIV rates unchanged in US despite best efforts

In 2001, CDC's campaign focused on outwardly healthy people who did not realize they had HIV - about one-fourth of the infected.

Nearly a million Americans now have the AIDS virus and the nation's ability to keep others from becoming infected still lags despite a government pledge four years ago to "break the back" of the AIDS epidemic by 2005.

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The campaign, launched by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in February 2001, intended to cut in half the estimated 40,000 new HIV infections that have occurred every year since the 1990s.

However, the rate of new cases remains about the same, according to CDC data released yesterday as part of the federal health agency's commemoration of World AIDS Day.

"We have a ways to go before we reach the mark of reducing new infections by half in the United States," said Dr. Ronald Valdiserri, the director of the CDC HIV and AIDS prevention program. He called the country's HIV infection rate "relatively stable."

"Clearly we want to continue, and are continuing, to fund programs to reach out to people who are high-risk and are not infected," he added.

In 2001, the CDC's campaign focused on outwardly healthy people who did not realize they had HIV - about one-fourth of those infected. Officials then said targeting them was key, because if they knew they were infected, they would be more likely to take steps not to spread the virus.

Such an effort "could possibly break the back of the epidemic in the United States," the CDC's Dr.