Reporting of AIDS: Tracking HIV Morbidity and Mortality

Physicians and other health care providers have reported more than 110 000 cases of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) to local and state health departments in the United States since 1981, including 34 000 in the past 12 months alone. Surveillance of AIDS in the United States accounts for nearly 60% of cases reported to the World Health Organization by 152 nations,¹ reflecting both the extent of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic in this country and the completeness of our reporting compared with that of other nations. Earlier in this decade, reports of AIDS cases in homosexual men, intravenous drug users, their heterosexual partners, transfusion recipients, and infants defined the principal modes of HIV transmission, well in advance of the discovery of HIV. More recently, AIDS surveillance has documented the spread of the epidemic beyond the major coastal centers, the striking disparity in the AIDS burden among blacks