By Gary Barlow

Staff writer

Is the AIDS crisis over?

As yet another World AIDS Day is marked Dec. 1, the answer, looking at the numbers in Chicago, in the nation and abroad, is a resounding “No.”

In its report earlier this month, UNAIDS revised its global estimate of HIV infections downward, reflecting advances in documenting the disease in India and elsewhere. But the agency still reported that an estimated 33.2 million people worldwide are infected with HIV.

Of those, about 2.5 million were infected this year, including more than 400,000 children under the age of 15. UNAIDS also estimates that more than 2 million people have died of AIDS this year.

Those numbers are still being fueled by hundreds of thousands of new HIV infections each year in Sub-Saharan Africa but the disease toll is also on the rise in India and other parts of Asia. North America saw some 46,000 new infections this year, the agency estimates, while 17,000 became infected in the Caribbean and 100,000 in South America.

While HIV infection rates are driven by heterosexual sex in many parts of the world, in some, including the United States, it still strikes gay men disproportionately. UNAIDS officials reported, for example, new research this year that uncovered a previously hidden epidemic among gay and bisexual men in Ukraine. A substantial portion of HIV infections also appear tied to sex between men in Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and most of Central America. In Nicaragua, researchers have found HIV rates among gay and bisexual men to be 38 times higher than in the general population.

In the U.S. more than half of all new infections are among gay and bisexual men, with black men continuing to be particularly hard hit. African Americans in general are disproportionately affected. Though they represent just 13 percent of the U.S. population, blacks accounted for 48 percent of new HIV and AIDS diagnoses in this country in 2005.

AIDS researchers have also encountered a troubling trend in Western Europe in recent years, where between 1999 and 2006, the number of new HIV infections among gay and bisexual men nearly doubled.

Locally, the most recent numbers reported by Chicago and Illinois health officials show that the gay community continues to be the group most affected by HIV/AIDS. In Illinois gay and bisexual men account for some 60 percent of new AIDS cases reported each year. In Chicago in 2005, 48 percent of new HIV infections were among gay and bisexual men.

Since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic more than 25 years ago, more than 12,000 gay and bisexual men in Chicago have been infected with HIV. Of those, more than half have died of AIDS.

The Chicago Department of Public Health reported that its Project CHAT survey of 1,147 gay and bisexual men in 2003-2004 uncovered a number of troubling trends. Of those surveyed, men ages 18-24 were almost three times as likely as older men to have never been tested for HIV, and 52 percent of HIV-positive men and 63 percent of HIV-negative said they didn’t know the HIV status of their most recent sex partner.