It's AIDS awareness month, making it an ideal time to reflect on the status of HIV in Oregon. Turns out, it's a good-news, bad-news story – but mostly good.
That’s because fewer Oregonians are dying from the disease than at any time since the late 1980s, according to numbers from the Oregon Public Health Division. And while there may be more total cases, the number of new infections has stabilized or declined:
- Altogether, 5,000 to 7,000 Oregonians have HIV in Oregon, most of them men.
- Last year, 76 HIV-positive Oregonians died, down from a peak of 310 in 1995.
- There were 260 new diagnoses last year, about the same for the past 10 years and far below the 1990s, when there were more than 400 cases a year through the first half of the decade.
- Five-year survival has increased from 42 percent for people diagnosed in 1990 to 88 percent in 2004, thanks to antiretroviral drugs developed in the 1990s. Ten-year survival is also 88 percent.
“People’s life expectancy is many years after infection,” said Dr. Sean Schafer, medical epidemiologist with the Public Health Division.
When it comes to HIV, “treatment is prevention,” said Michael Anderson-Nathe, director of prevention and education and interim deputy executive director at Cascade AIDS Project in Portland.
Treatment reduces transmission risk by as much as 96 percent by cutting the number of viral particles in the blood and semen.
“You reduce the infectiousness of the people who are already infected,” Schafer said.
Is there any chance that the good news about mortality and new diagnoses backfire and reverse the curve?
“I don’t think there are fears of backsliding or that people aren’t going to be as vigilant,” Anderson said.
Schafer agreed there’s not a lot of evidence of that happening.
“One of the challenges of public health is to say, this is great news and to sustain this, we have to keep you in treatment,” Schafer said.
The other big push is to get the undiagnosed diagnosed. While the total number of HIV cases in Oregon has inched up over the years, it's hard to pinpoint. It's estimated there are about 1,000 people who don’t know they’re infected, Schafer said. Less than half of adult Oregonians have ever been tested, which health officials would like to see increase.
Anderson said with the Affordable Care Act, more people will have health coverage and will be screened.
“A lot of things have combined to make us hopeful we’re getting ahead of the disease,” Anderson-Nathe said.