Parents, Male Homoloveuals Prey On Your Boys 1740

You poor, uninformed bottom feeder...

DURBAN, July 10 2004 (AFP) - Complacency towards AIDS is rising among American homoloveuals, who remain the country's most exposed group in the epidemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Monday.

Of the 40,000 estimated new infections in the United States last year, 70 percent were men, and 30 percent were women, the American health insbreastute said at a presentation at the International AIDS Conference here.

Among the men, 60 percent were gays or biloveuals, while 15 percent were heteroloveuals, it said.

"The evidence continues to mount that gay men of all races remain at alarming risk for infection. In fact, risk may again by increasing," said David Holtgrave, director of the CDC's HIV Prevention Division.

Holtgrave suggested that older gays were getting fed up with using condoms to avoid catching human immune-deficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS.

Younger men, meanwhile, had become lulled into thinking that powerful retroviral drugs had tamed the disease.

"To address the urgent need for HIV prevention in this population, we will need to address multiple factors, including prevention burnout among older men, beliefs that HIV is no longer a serious disease, a new generation of gay and biloveual men who must be reached, and cultural issues for gay men of colour."

The CDC's conclusion is based on data showing rising incidence of gonorrhea among HIV-infected homoloveuals in nine US cities, which contrasted with declining rates of gonorrhea among infected heteroloveuals.

Amongst gay and biloveual men, the rate more than doubled from 1993 to 1998, suggesting "a high risk of risk behaviour" in this group, the CDC said.

Another study, conducted among 1,942 HIV-infected gay and biloveual men in 12 cities and states, noted a 50-percent increase in the proportion of men who had engaged in unprotected anal love.

********************************************************* Another alarm bell was research showing that biloveual men had become a

"bridge" for transmitting HIV to women. A study of 3,492 gay and

biloveual men and women aged 15 to 22 in seven US cities found that 6.6

per cent of biloveual men were HIV positive. ***********************************************************

Newly-released UN figures estimate there are 34.3 million people in the world carrying HIV or AIDS. The tally in the US is 900,000 in a population of 275 million, the CDC said.

The infection in the United States is concentrated on homoloveuals, in sharp contrast to the situation in Africa, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the global epidemic and where transmission is overwhelmingly caused by heteroloveual intercourse.

The CDC report also said that blacks and Hispanics in the United States were also suffering an increase in HIV incidence, although the risk varied enormously from city to city and state to state.

000710 AF000763