WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (AFP) - The HIV infection rate among African-Americans has fallen by five percent a year since 2001, but the group still has a sharply higher rate than whites, US federal data published Thursday showed.

In 2004, the HIV virus that causes AIDS statistically infected 76.3 of 100,000 blacks, compared with 88.7 in 2001, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, citing reports by 33 state and local health departments.

"The findings indicate that the rate of HIV diagnoses in these states decreased among non-Hispanic blacks from 2001 to 2004; however, the rate of HIV diagnosis among blacks remained disproportionately high," the CDC said in a statement.

In 2004 the number of blacks testing HIV positive was 8.4 times higher than whites, at 76.3 per 100,000 compared with 9.0.

For the entire US population during the 2001-2004 period, blacks accounted for 50 percent of HIV/AIDS diagnoses, at 80,187 in a total of 157,252 new cases.

The overall annual rate of HIV/AIDS diagnoses remained relatively stable, at 20.7 per 100,000 last year compared with 22.8 in 2001, the federal health agency said.

The CDC cautioned that the 33 states, whose data includes the names of the infected, are estimated to represent 63 percent of all AIDS cases in the United States during 2001-2004.

The experts said it was unable to determine whether the diagnoses reported represented a new infection or the discovery of an infection of some duration.

The infection rate decline among blacks was mainly linked to a 9.1 drop among injection-drug users, it said.

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