HIV INFECTION: HOW COMMON IS IT?
It is estimated that over 30 million people are infected with HIV worldwide, with 16,000 new ones added each day. Approximately a million people are infected in the United States, and 350,000 people have died of AIDS in the United States since the beginning of the epidemic. By the year 2000, it is estimated that between 38 and 108 million people in the world will carry the virus. Hot spots at risk for an explosion of infection during the next few years include Southeast Asia, India, and Southern Asia, mostly because of a lack of education about how HIV is spread, continued practice of unsafe sexual acts that facilitate transmission, and a shortage of treatment options. In the United States, urban areas—particularly in California, Florida, New York, Maryland, Delaware, and Washington, D.C.—have been the hardest hit. However, the spread of HIV infection is by no means restricted to urban areas; rural communities have also been affected by the disease. Sexual contact remains the most common route through which infection takes place throughout the world. People who are infected with HIV are frequently symptom tree, and therefore may not know that they are infected.
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