THE HIV SURGE

You’ve probably read all about the sudden surge in HIV infection rates in San Francisco. It was all over the papers. Drudge ran it heavy. So did almost everyone else. The only problem is – none of the news stories had hard numbers in them. There’s a reason for that. There’s no mandatory name-reported HIV transmission statistics in San Francisco – so the Public Health Dept has to come up with all sorts of weird statistical analyses to arrive at some sort of number of alleged infections from an often unrepresentative sample from public health clinics. I’m going to try and dig up how these numbers were arrived at this week – and I’ll report back. But if they’re anything like as reliable as the hysterical statistics put out last summer (which were later largely retracted), I’ll be unconvinced. The latest real numbers of AIDS diagnoses and AIDS deaths in San Francisco (the only solid data we have) show an all-time low, as they do almost everywhere else. I’m sure unsafe sex is on the rise; I’m also sure that the likelihood of meeting an HIV-positive guy is higher now than in the recent past. The fact that there are new infections every year, and fewer and fewer of us are dying, means that the pool of possible infecters keeps growing. But it’s more complicated than that. The impact of our low viral loads, brought about by the powerful drug cocktails, may simultaneously make transmission harder. We have less virus in our bodies and therefore it’s harder to infect others. So an increase in unsafe sex, even between someone negative and someone positive, may not bring about the rise in HIV some fear. I got my own bloodwork back last week, for example, and the HIV in my bloodstream is officially “undetectable” even by the most powerful methods available. It’s been that way for four years now. My immune system is indistinguishable in large part from someone who’s HIV-negative. I have no intention of testing the theory, but I doubt I could infect someone easily even if I tried. So the bottom line on new HIV infections is: we just don’t know and it’s about as complicated as the Palm Beach ballot. Which is why it’s better for news organizations to provide actual statistics when declaring a new wave of AIDS, instead of relying on health departments with budgets to save and axes to grind. To be continued …