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This podcast is presented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC – safer, healthier people.

Can you explain the new method of estimating HIV incidence and why it represents a breakthrough?

[Hall] “We are very fortunate in the United States that we have a good reporting system for HIV diagnoses. Unfortunately, from the HIV diagnoses, we don’t know how long people have actually been infected. So this breakthrough technology developed at CDC now allows us to distinguish long-standing from recent infections, and using that data with advanced statistical methods, we were able to estimate the new infections in the United States for 2006. This breakthrough technology enabled us to get a much more precise estimate and this information we can now use to target interventions.”

How representative is the new estimate?

[Hall] “We can think of the data that we have as a sample, and then we use this data in our advanced statistical methodology to come up with a national estimate of the number of new HIV infections. The 22 states that we included in our analyses represent 73 percent of the AIDS diagnoses in the United States. Also, we had this estimate undergo a rigorous scientific review, so we actually are able to give now the clearest picture to date of the number of new HIV infections in the United States.”

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