News
“Eight states and Puerto Rico will no longer receive federal money for an advanced H.I.V. monitoring system that showed that the annual infection rate in the nation was 40 percent higher than previously estimated, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.
“The change will lower the number of jurisdictions using the system to 25, from 34, just as health departments are struggling to react to the news, released earlier this month, that the spread of AIDS is far worse than they had thought.
“The jurisdictions that lost financing were Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Puerto Rico. (Emphasis added)
“Terry Butler, a spokeswoman for the National Center for H.I.V., S.T.D. and TB Prevention at the centers, said that the total money for the system — which is awarded to applicants on a competitive basis — would remain the same, but that the remaining 25 participating states and cities would receive more. Ms. Butler said those participants had the most reliable systems and could help the centers produce the best estimates.
“The system uses a new test that distinguishes recent infections from old ones, helping epidemiologists track them in something much closer to real time than was previously possible.”
Source: New York Times, August 22, 2008