State of Minnesota in grip of HIV/AIDS cases
It’s indeed a bad news for the state of Minnesota as the number of HIV/AIDS cases have intensified all of a sudden. It has been learnt from reports that the new cases of HIV infection in the state happened to be 326 in 2008. However the number of new cases was 325 in 2007 and 318 in 2006. The report was brought to the fore by the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH), "HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report – 2008." It is to be noted that Minnesota is a prominent state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Besides it is the twelfth largest state by area in the U.S. and also the twenty-first most populous, with just over five million residents.
According to the discretion of report, altogether 8,819 HIV/AIDS cases have been reported and this includes 2,976 people who have died, since MDH began tracking AIDS in 1982 and HIV in 1985. It is useful to mention that (approximately) 6,220 people are existing with the disease of HIV in Minnesota at present. All these indicate that on average MDH received a new reported HIV case every 27 hours in 2008.
Speaking on this, Peter Carr, Director of the STD and HIV Section at MDH stated, "The annual number of cases appears to be inching upward." "We have averaged about 300 cases per year starting in 2001 until recently when we saw about 320 cases being reported each year for the last 3 years." On the other hand, as indicated by health officials, males are worst affected owing to this. The increase has been noticed among males of ages 13 to 24 (in particular) and the cases have become more than doubled since 2001. There were only 18 new cases reported in 2001 compared with 42 cases in this age group in 2008.
You can gauge this in a better manner if you get acquainted with the fact that of the 326 new HIV infections reported in 2008, 238 were male and 88 were female. Before I go, cases among white males and among men who have sex with men both increased by 13 percent, although cases among males decreased by four percent on the whole.
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