Health officials of San Francisco stated that there has been nearly a 10 percent drop in the HIV infected case in the past five years, but also added that their job is far from done.
The city's Department of Public Health had expected new HIV infections to rise 33 percent given an increase in the number of case of syphilis, epidemiologist Willi McFarland told The Los Angeles Times, reports foodconsumer.org."It’s a great news; we're making progress," said Mark Cloutier of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. "But I think it is both bad planning and bad public policy to look toward the future based on a (short-term) trend. We don't know how long this will last."
The San Francisco dip runs counter to the national trend, where the number of HIV-infected men rose 8 percent in 2004.
While officials said they do not know the reasons for San Francisco's decline, a number of people pointed to the practice called "sero-sorting" -- a practice of engaging in sexual activity only with partners sharing the same HIV status.
