City HIV hits all-time low
NEW DIAGNOSES of HIV in New York City have reached an all-time low, the Health Department will announce Wednesday.
In 2016, 2,279 people were newly diagnosed with the virus — down 8.6% from 2015, according to data from the city’s HIV Surveillance Annual Report.
“I would even go so far to say that it’s good and big news,” Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the Health Department’s deputy commissioner for disease control, told the Daily News. “I’m pretty euphoric about the news, to be honest.”
In 2001, when the city firsrt started tracking new HIV diagnoses, there were 5,906 infections.
The drop was even starker among men who have sex with men: Among that population, diagnoses fell from 1,450 in 2015 to 1,236 in in 2016 — a 14.8% drop.
New diagnoses among that group had been stalled in recent years, Daskalakis said — and the city believes this year’s sudden drop is thanks to increased use of pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PREP. Those are preventative drugs that can be taken by people who don’t have HIV, but are at risk of it — and are increasingly being prescribed to men who have sex with men.
“I’m excited because if this is what happened in 2016, I can only imagine what’s going to happen in 2017 in terms of accelerating the decline of new infections,” Daskalakis said. “We’ve launched so many new interventions that focus on getting people on new medicines.”
The city estimates that 5% of men who have sex with men were on PREP at the start of 2016 — but that grew to 30% by the end of the year.
The news wasn’t all good — infections among women rose in 2016.
“That’s the part that to me is the most concerning,” Daskalakis said.
After having success with men, the city will look to make more women who might be at risk of contracting HIV — and their doctors — aware of PREP in the next year.
“When the providers of care for women really buy into pre-exposure prophylactics and understand its role, all of a sudden they’re prescribing to their patients,” Daskalakis said.