Questioning The AIDS Infection Rate Story

I am troubled by the explanations for a rising number of a new AIDS and HIV infections among young people in a story making the rounds on Yahoo! today.

The story quotes a number of experts who claim the rising infection rates among teens and young adults has to do with an image problem; that is, the perception that AIDS is less serious because there are drugs to treat it. People are living longer with AIDS, and as a result, young people are less afraid.

Experts say a number of factors may be at play, including the fact that many HIV-infected patients are now being kept healthy with powerful drugs — making AIDS seem like less of a threat to young people than it did in the past.

‘Certainly the “scare factor” isn’t there anymore,’ said Rowena Johnston, vice president of research at the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) in New York City.

Here’s my problem with that explantion: It’s overly convenient. It assumes that young people are stupid, and cannot gauge the seriousness of AIDS and HIV. The even bigger problem? The story does a poor job fleshing out other ideas and explantions for increased numbers of infections.  

Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three alternative explanations for that increase.

• The rise in abstinence-only education that coincided with the administration of President Bush. The data in the story, you’ll note, compares recent infection rates with those going back to 2001, the year the current administration took office.
• The increasing number of young people. The lede story in USA Today makes a big issue out of the rising number of 20-somethings in this country. Quote: “A larger generation of 20-somethings, an age group more likely than others to move as they attend college, launch their careers or leave their childhood homes. The number of people in their 20s dropped from 40.5 million in 1990 to 38.3 million in 2000 but rebounded to almost 42 million in 2006.” If there are millions more in that age group, one would assume the nunber of new infections would rise on an actual basis, but not on a per capita basis.
• An increase in the availability and efficacy of testing. This was something has been seen with cancers, as technologies like CT scans and PSA tests became more widely used. Are more kids getting tested? Are tests much better than they were five years ago? I don’t know — the story doesn’t say.