ource: The Canadian Press
TORONTO - A quarter-century after AIDS burst on the world's radar as it began ravaging gay male populations in North America, public health authorities in a number of developed countries are seeing a disturbing trend.
Rates of HIV infections among men who have sex with men are on the rise, reversing years of declining rates in that community.
As World AIDS Day approaches, several leading public health authorities raised the politically touchy topic in a commentary published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, asking why infection rates among this group of individuals are rising and what can be done to stem the trend.
"The tragedy of the epidemic for an earlier generation of MSM must not be repeated," they argued, using the public health community's shorthand - MSM - for men who have sex with men.
The authors are Dr. Harold Jaffe, director of the department of public health at Oxford University, Dr. Kevin de Cock, head of HIV-AIDS at the World Health Organization and Dr. Ronald Valdiserri, chief consultant to the public health strategic health care group of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
The commentary looks only at trends in western countries, where men who have sex with men have always made up the lion's share of people living with HIV-AIDS.
They noted there was a 13-per-cent increase in American MSM living with HIV-AIDS between 2001 and 2005. A 10-fold increase in syphilis cases among MSM in the United States over the same period is further evidence of an increased frequency in unprotected sex, the authors said.
HIV-AIDS rates among men who have sex with men are also in the increase in Canada. (...)
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