The U.S. HIV care system is being swamped by a rising tide of new patients, an Institute of Medicine (IOM) report warns.
As HIV treatment continues to improve, people with HIV are living much longer. Meanwhile, the CDC’s universal HIV screening program is bearing fruit, identifying more people who are infected with the AIDS virus.
The result is a widening gap between the number of Americans with HIV and the resources available to treat them.
“Our system is getting stretched,” IOM panel chair Paul D. Cleary, PhD, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, tells WebMD. “There is going to be a dramatic change in the number of people with HIV detected and cared for. When we start treating this many more people … we find there are barriers to getting them into available treatment facilities.”
Over 20% of the 1.1 million Americans with HIV don’t know they are infected. Learning they have HIV is good for the individual, as earlier treatment means better health. It’s also good for society, as people who know they carry HIV are less likely to infect others — and treatment actually makes a person less infectious.
“There is a moral imperative that if we do testing, we have to get people who test positive into care,” Michael Saag, MD, tells WebMD.
But there’s a raft of problems with actually providing this care, notes Saag, director of AIDS research at the University of Alabama, Birmingham and immediate past president of the HIV Medicine Association.
Saag’s state-of-the-art AIDS clinic is a prime example. In 2000, the clinic was caring for 750 patients. Now the same clinic, with pretty much the same funding and same staff level, is caring for 1,800 patients. (more…)