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National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day: ‘AIDS is still here’
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BOSTON — Recent data show that, overall, new HIV diagnoses are declining among women in the United States. However, more than 7,000 women were diagnosed with HIV in 2016, and certain populations continue to be disproportionately affected by the epidemic, including black women and white women who inject drugs, according to the CDC.
National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day is held each year on March 10 recognize the ongoing battle of HIV/AIDS in this population. To mark the occasion, Infectious Disease News spoke with several researchers and clinicians at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) about how far we have come and what still needs to be done to improve HIV care in women and girls.
“AIDS is still here, and HIV infection is still a problem,” CROI Chair Judith S. Currier, MD, professor of medicine and chief of the division of infectious diseases at the University of California, Los Angeles, and network chair and principal investigator of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG). “We need to test people; we need to get women and girls who have HIV on treatment; and we need to increase participation in research — both the planning of research and the ways we conduct our studies so that as we develop more effective treatments and as we work toward a cure, women are involved in those efforts.”
For more perspectives on National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, click here.
Disclosure: Currier reports receiving research grants from Theratechnologies.