HIV DEATH RATES FELL BY HALF, CDC SAYS

Deaths related to HIV in the United States fell significantly from 2010 through 2018, regardless of sex, age, race or region, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.

The death rate declined overall by about half, a welcome sign in the fight against the virus, experts said. But the data also highlighted some troubling trends: Gains among women, Black people and those of multiple races were much smaller. And the rate of death was about twice as high in Southern states as in the Northeast.

Still, experts said the news was a testament to the enormous strides made in efforts to end the HIV epidemic.

“The reduction in death is something that we couldn’t have imagined even as recently as 2010,” roughly a decade after the introduction of powerful antiretroviral drugs, said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo,

director of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, who was not involved in the work. “The fact that these therapies have become so standard and turned things around for so many people is just incredibly gratifying and astonishing.”

Marrazzo credited the success to investments in HIV care, including through the federal Ryan White HIV/ AIDS Program, for such services as nutritional support, social work, psychiatry and other assistance. “This is not just about the drugs. It’s the entire structure that supports people,” she said. “Sometimes that’s lost in the dialogue.”

From 1990 through 2011, deaths among people with AIDS decreased significantly. They dropped even more after 2012, when treatment guidelines began recommending antiretroviral therapy for anyone with HIV.

CDC researchers analyzed data from the National HIV Surveillance System from 2010 through 2018 of people older than 13 years who had received a diagnosis of HIV. They looked at raw numbers as well as age-adjusted rates of deaths per 1,000 people. They parsed deaths from 2010 through 2017 as resulting directly from HIV or from other causes, including drug use, cardiovascular disease or other conditions.

The overall death rate among people with HIV dropped by about one-third, the analysis found. But the rate of deaths directly related to HIV decreased by 48.4 percent, or a decline to 4.7 deaths per 1,000 people with HIV, from 9.1 per 1,000, whereas deaths as a result of other causes fell by only 8.6 percent. The results were published on Thursday in the CDC’S Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.