The State of HIV in the US: 2022
HIV is not yet done.
In the United States in 2020, there were approximately 1.2 million people living with HIV. Scientists estimate that approximately 13%, or 156,000 of those people are unaware of their diagnosis. There are also over 30,000 new infections in the US every year.
How can this be? It’s easy when HIV is a disease that commonly presents with mild to no symptoms, or comes masked as COVID-19 or the flu. It’s even easier when HIV is a disease that nobody wants. Would you seek out testing for a disease that leaves you abandoned and forsaken by your own community? A disease that leaves you emotionally scarred and traumatized? In many communities, watching someone be marginalized, humiliated, and abandoned because they have this disease is enough deterrent to dampen efforts to increase testing. We can’t eliminate HIV if we can’t identify where it is hiding. But, we can’t test if the social cost of a positive diagnosis is as high as it is in some communities.
Once diagnosed, people living with HIV enter what is called the “HIV Continuum of Care.” This is a tool used in public health to capture how many people are plugged into HIV care at different stages of the process, from HIV diagnosis, to linkage to care, to retention in care, to HIV viral suppression, which is the end goal of HIV treatment. The challenges are not clinical - the challenges are social. At every stage of this Continuum of Care, people living with HIV and their care teams have to fight against HIV stigma, marginalization, and the adverse impacts of the Social Determinants of Health to get people into care and engaged in care for life. It’s an uphill battle for many, and a losing battle for some. My purpose is to help those unable to fight for themselves. To bring them healing. To help them find and enter communities where they are welcome.