We are indebted to the persons and programs that provided data for this document. They have demonstrated their support of efforts to promote the use of high-quality data by community planning groups to help prevent HIV transmission and to provide necessary services for persons affected by HIV disease. We are especially grateful to the staff, past and present, of the Louisiana HIV/AIDS Surveillance Program, who collected much of the data presented in this profile; the Louisiana STD Surveillance Program, especially Jim Scioneaux, Dennis Dorst, Joy Ewell, and Rafael Jarpa; Buddy Bates, coordinator of Louisiana’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System; Abdelhak Abdou, services data manager in Louisiana’s Ryan White Title II Program; Jessica Lin, data manager in Louisiana’s HIV Prevention Program; and Janet Blair and Amy Drake, of the HIV Incidence and Case Surveillance Branch, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC.

We recognize the following persons, who provided insight and contributed substantially to the writing, organizing, or editing of this document: Stephanie Broyles, Jennifer Chase, Debbie Wendell, Paige Bordelon, Amy Zapata, Courtney Alison, Daphne LeSage, Kira Radtke, and Beth Scalco, of the Louisiana HIV/AIDS Program, which includes Louisiana’s HIV prevention, HIV/AIDS surveillance, and Ryan White Title II programs; and Mary Lyn Gaffield, Hazel Dean, Brooke Steele, and Irum Zaidi, of the HIV Incidence and Case Surveillance Branch, CDC. We appreciate their thoughtful contributions and hard work.

Lastly, we thank the persons who have been involved in the HIV Prevention Community Planning Groups and the Ryan White Title II regional CARE Consortia for providing feedback over the years regarding which data are most helpful to their respective planning groups. We continue to solicit their input, as our efforts are only as good as the information on which we base our programmatic decisions.

This document was created in collaboration with the CDC.