Better counting raises HIV rate in U.S. by 25 percent

By Daniel Bases

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Researchers have been undercounting new cases of HIV infection in the United States, meaning the rate is probably 25 percent higher at 50,000 people per year, the nation's top AIDS doctor said on Tuesday.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the rate of infection was not increasing but that new methods of calculating the rate showed infections were more common than previous estimates.

Fauci, attending the United Nations' 2008 High Level Meeting on AIDS, told reporters the previous methods had shown the rate of new infections in the United States had hit a plateau at around 40,000 per year for the past 14 years.

"They were counting the numbers in a way that was leaving out certain segments of the society. So that 40,000 was probably an undercounted number," he said.

Instead of using an extrapolated mathematical model to come up with the rate of new infections, he said, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was now relying on better counting of more groups, households and regions.

"The number went up to about 50,000. That doesn't mean that the actual rate of new infections increased. It means that we are now no longer missing counting the ones that we missed early," Fauci said. "It was always 50,000 a year."

The new counting methods are not changing the overall picture of AIDS in America, Fauci said.

In the United States, with a population of about 300 million, some 1.1 million people are infected with HIV, of which 25 percent do not know it. That leaves 770,000 documented cases.