BOSTON, Massachusetts, Feb 26 (AFP) - The HIV infection rate doubled among US blacks in 10 years while holding steady in the white population, according to a government report.
Epidemiologists with the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention compared data from 1988 to 1994 with figures from 1999 to 2002 and found infection rates among blacks doubling from 1.10 to 2.14 percent.
Infection rates among whites increased 0.33 percent to 0.43 percent over the same period, a statistically insignificant variation, CDC scientist Geraldine McQuillan said at a press conference Friday on the sidelines of the 12th annual conference on retroviruses.
The data was drawn from a representative sample of the US population which however excluded members of the military, the prison population and homeless people.
The infection rate was highest among 40 to 49 year olds while holding at an encouragingly low 1.5 percent among younger people, McQuillan said.
Researchers said socio-economic factors like poverty, drugs and limited access to health care were behind the racial disparity.
Meanwhile, almost half of HIV-positive Americans are not treated with antiretroviral drugs -- which suppress although they do not eliminate the virus which causes AIDS, according to another study published here Friday.
An analysis of national data and CDC reports showed that 480,000 HIV-positive Americans aged 15 to 49 should have been treated with antiretroviral drugs in 2003, but only 268,000 or 56 percent of them were, according to researcher Eyasu Teshale.
Most of those who went untreated had not yet been diagnosed, he said.
About one million people have AIDS and about 40,000 people test positive for HIV annually in the United States. There are more than 18,000 AIDS-related deaths each year.
Globally, the pandemic touches 39 million people, most of them in Africa, and more than three million died in 2004, according to UN figures.
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