Remaining Risk

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Anchor lead: While most HIV news nationally is good, troublesome pockets remain, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Deaths related to HIV have dropped beyond expectation, CDC data indicate. That’s great, and we still have work to do, says Joseph Cofrancesco, an HIV expert at Johns Hopkins.

Cofrancesco: If you’re treated early you do well. If you are delayed in that treatment you will not do well, so it’s incumbent upon public health, medicine, how to get back to this idea of universal testing. The other thing that was worrisome was that the greatest ethnicity deaths were among black persons in the US in the South. Public health experts, providers, politicians, all need to recognize that in their area, people are not having the same degree of progress that people in other parts of the country are.   :34

Cofrancesco says continuing effort must be put into removing barriers to early and frequent testing among those at risk, as well as those that stand in the way of effective and ongoing treatment for HIV infection. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.