World AIDS Day 2011

On December 1, CDC and partners from around the globe observe World AIDS Day by "Leading with Science, Uniting for Action". This year's theme highlights global HIV/AIDS prevention success and continued commitment to saving more lives.

The first cases of HIV/AIDS were reported 30 years ago in the June 5, 1981 issue of CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Since that time, people living with HIV/AIDS, researchers, health professionals, activists, non-profit organizations, community-based organizations, and others across the globe have worked together to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Today, we recognize our global and domestic successes, and commit to saving more lives and achieving the goal of an AIDS-free generation.

Our Global Response

More than two-thirds of the estimated 34 million people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide are in developing countries and nearly three-fourths of the 2.7 million new HIV infections in 2010 occurred in these countries. As a science-based public health and disease prevention agency, CDC provides support to nearly 80 countries to strengthen their national HIV programs and build sustainable public health systems through the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). CDC works side-by-side with Ministries of Health in these countries and with other partners to implement sustainable HIV/AIDS interventions, and to measure their effectiveness in reducing infections and deaths from HIV/AIDS.

As a key implementing partner of PEPFAR, CDC applauds recent scientific evidence on prevention of new HIV infections as highlighted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on November 8. This evidence indicates that three key interventions – prevention of mother-to-child transmission, voluntary medical male circumcision, and antiretroviral treatment as prevention– employed in combination may, for the first time, provide a plausible path to break the cycle of new HIV infections. CDC already supports all of these interventions as well as extensive HIV counseling and testing in developing countries with high HIV prevalence. By embracing a more concentrated emphasis on the scale up of these evidence-based combination prevention interventions, we now have an historic opportunity to drive down the rate of new HIV infections worldwide.

• Prevention of mother-to-child transmission: Today, 1 in 7 new infections worldwide occur through mother-to-child transmission. CDC, in collaboration with other PEPFAR partners, helped prevent 114,000 babies from being born with HIV in 2010 through extensive HIV testing for pregnant women and antiretroviral treatment for those identified as HIV-positive. Further scale up is underway in support of the Global Plan for Elimination of New Infections among Children by 2015 (recently launched by the U.S. Government and UNAIDS).
• Voluntary medical male circumcision: Since 2007, some 1,000,000 men from less developed countries around the world have been voluntarily circumcised for HIV prevention with significant support from the U.S. Government. This low-cost procedure reduces the risk of female-to-male transmission by about 60%. CDC continues to support the scale-up of this key intervention with an emphasis on eight priority countries in sub-Saharan Africa with high HIV prevalence and low coverage for male circumcision.
• Treatment as prevention: The HIV Prevention Trials Network, funded by the National Institutes of Health, published ground-breaking research in May indicating that early initiation of antiretroviral treatment for HIV-positive people led to a dramatic 96% reduction in HIV transmission to the uninfected partner. With this knowledge, CDC and other PEPFAR partners continue to pursue scale up of treatment with over 5 million people currently accessing life-saving antiretroviral medicines.

Building Upon Global Success by Saving More Lives at Home

Nearly 1.2 million people in the United States are living with HIV infection, with approximately 50,000 Americans becoming infected with HIV each year. The United States has made tremendous progress against HIV infection, preventing hundreds of thousands of new infections and helping people live longer, healthier, more productive lives with effective treatments. Although new infections are stable and people with HIV are living longer, greater effort is needed. The growing population of people living with HIV will lead to increases in new HIV infections if current prevention efforts are not intensified. Too many people do not know they have HIV and too few people with HIV are receiving proper prevention, treatment, and care services. To reduce new HIV infections, CDC is investing in proven interventions that will have the greatest possible impact on reducing the spread of HIV in the United States.

CDC and its partners are pursuing High-Impact Prevention to reduce new HIV infections, a strategy guided by the National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS). Released by the White House in 2010, NHAS calls on the nation to intensify HIV prevention efforts in the hardest-hit geographic areas and populations, using the interventions that will have the greatest impact.

The key components of High-Impact Prevention include:

• Cost-effective interventions
• A focus on activities that can be brought to full-scale in the targeted population
• The right combination of interventions for the targeted population
• Prioritized programs that will have the maximum impact on reducing new HIV infections

We have more proven prevention tools than ever to help stop the spread of HIV. Proven tools include HIV testing and retention in care; access to condoms and sterile syringes; risk reduction programs for HIV-positive and HIV-negative individuals; antiretroviral therapy for infected individuals to reduce the risk of transmission; and screening and treatment for other sexually transmitted infections.

The Key Role of HIV Testing

Testing is the only way to identify the nearly 250,000 Americans currently living with HIV who do not know they're infected – that's 1 in 5 of all Americans with HIV. HIV testing and diagnosis are the first steps toward connecting people to life-extending treatment, as well as helping to prevent the spread of HIV to partners.

HIV testing should be a routine part of health care. CDC recommends:

• Everyone ages 13-64 get tested at least once.
• Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM) be tested for HIV and STIs at least annually. CDC data show that sexually active MSM might benefit from more frequent testing (e.g., every 3 to 6 months).
• Others at high risk for HIV should also get tested more often (at least annually). This includes injection-drug users and their sex partners, persons who exchange sex for money or drugs, and sex partners of HIV-infected persons.
• Women get tested during each pregnancy.

On World AIDS Day, we pay tribute to the millions of people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States and around the world, and the millions of people who have been tested for HIV. We recognize that HIV testing and linkage to care can save lives and are working to build on those successes to help ensure more people live longer and healthier lives. Much work still needs to be done but, today, new scientific knowledge combined with proven success in implementing prevention, care and treatment interventions provides the opportunity to save the lives of millions of people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide. Through continued commitment, we can achieve the goal of an AIDS-free generation and prevent the transmission of the virus to millions of people yet to be born.

More Information

• CDC Global HIV/AIDS
• CDC Fact Sheets: HIV in the United States
  • HIV in the United States
  • HIV in the United States en espanol (VIH en los Estados Unidos)
• Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR)
  For the World AIDS Day Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
• CDC National HIV Testing Database
  Find an HIV test site near you from the National HIV Testing Database, a CDC-sponsored service available 24 hours a day.
• Recursos nacionales para las pruebas del VIH y las ETS
  Encontrar un sitio de prueba cerca de usted, un servicio de los Centros para el Control y la Prevención de Enfermedades
• Act Against AIDS
  Be a Part of the Solution.
• AIDS.gov
  AIDS.gov's mission is to improve access to Federal HIV/AIDS information programs serving minority and other communities most at-risk for, or living with, HIV, through a variety of new media channels, and to support the use of new media tools by federal and community partners.
• Facing AIDS 2011
  Join AIDS.gov's Facing AIDS 2011 campaign for a World AIDS Day photo sharing initiative. By putting a face and a voice to AIDS, you can help promote HIV testing and decrease stigma around HIV.
• CDC Radio PSA for World AIDS Day [PODCAST - 0:30 seconds]