New AIDS Cases in NYC Dropped 25% This Year

Wow, for once there is some good news about AIDS in New York City! According to new statistics, the number of adults in New York newly diagnosed to the virus has dropped by 25% since last year. Read the full story after the jump!

Wendy L.

(NYTimes)–

In a sign of progress against one of the great plagues of the last generation, a dwindling number of New Yorkers have been diagnosed with AIDS over the last eight years, according to new statistics released Friday.

The number of adults newly diagnosed with AIDS dropped to 2,225 in the 2011 fiscal year, which ended June 30. That total was 25 percent lower than the total the year before (2,969 cases diagnosed), and 47 percent lower than in the 2003 fiscal year, when there were 4,164 new cases, according to the Mayor’s Management Report, which was released Friday.

Dr. Monica Sweeney, assistant commissioner of the Bureau of H.I.V. Prevention and Control in the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said the decline was a “proxy for improved care.”

“It’s not that people are not infected” with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, she said. “It is that they are taking medications, they’re able to be more adherent, treatment has become easier.”

But she added that the number of people newly diagnosed with H.I.V. has also been going down, though those numbers were not included in the report.

She said that the improving numbers had raised concerns among public health officials that the public might become cavalier in their behavior. “Many people who are not infected have what we call treatment optimism,” Dr. Sweeney said. “Why bother using a condom? Why bother not having multiple partners? — and people are still getting infected — because of the success of the treatment,” Dr. Sweeney said.

New infections were most common among men under 30, especially black and Latino men, who have sex with men; black women; and to a lesser extent Latino women, she said.

On the other hand, she said, because of programs directed at pregnant women and drug users, it is rare for babies to be born infected, and “people getting infected from intravenous drug use has gone from the thousands to 185” in 2009, the last year of complete data available.

The historic numbers tell a striking tale of an epidemic that crested and then began to fall as the means of transmission became better understood and drug treatment was simplified from a handful of pills to a single capsule containing three medications.

City charts show 52 new diagnoses of AIDS before 1981, rising to 160 in 1981, 540 in 1982, 1,097 in 1983 and then soaring to a peak of 12,745 in 1993 before beginning a gradual decline to the present levels.

In another positive statistic, deaths from unintentional drug overdoses were down to 549 in the 2011 fiscal year from 905 in 2003.

But Daliah Heller, an assistant health commissioner for alcohol and drug use prevention and care, said that the decline in deaths from traditional drugs like heroin, cocaine and methadone masked a rise in deaths from prescription opioids like oxycodone and hydrocodone.

Oxycodone is known by brand names like Oxycontin and Percocet and hyrocodone is sold as Vicodin.

She said that while public health officials had become more successful in reaching traditional addicts, they were trying to develop new strategies to reach prescription drug abusers.

“It is important that we look upstream to sources of prescription opioids — to doctors and pharmacies — because it is a preventable cause of death,” Dr. Heller said.