Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Miami Herald - July 8, 2002
And more than half of the HIV-positive men surveyed said they considered themselves to be at low risk of infection, lead researcher Dr. Duncan MacKellar, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a world AIDS conference.
MacKellar and colleagues conducted an anonymous survey and HIV tests on 5,719 gay or bisexual men between the ages of 15 and 29 who lived in Los Angeles, Seattle, Dallas, Baltimore, Newark or Miami.
Of the 573 men who tested positive for HIV infection, 440 were unaware of it and might have inadvertently transmitted the virus to their partners, the researchers said.
Among HIV-infected African-American men, 91 percent said they had not known they were HIV positive. Seventy percent of infected Hispanic men and 60 percent of infected white men did not know.
Almost 60 percent of the 440 HIV-positive men considered themselves to be at low risk of HIV infection, MacKellar added.
"Over half had either not been tested in the past year or had never been tested for HIV," he said.
In the previous six months, half of the 440 reported having unprotected anal intercourse with one or more men, and nearly half of these men said they did not use condoms because they thought they or their partners were at low risk of infection.
MacKellar told Reuters the stigma of being tested for HIV remained a problem. In the current study, participants listed two primary reasons for not getting tested -- they thought they were at low risk or they were "scared to learn the results."
"We've got to do a better job of making sure that young men who have sex with men really understand the risks they are engaging in and the risks for acquiring HIV infection," MacKellar concluded.
"We also need to do a better job of getting the word out of the benefits of early diagnosis and care."
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