ATLANTA, June 8 (UPI) -- A fifth of people with HIV don't know it, and a third of them are diagnosed so late in their infection they develop AIDS within one year, U.S. officials say.
Some states with the largest incidence of the human immunodeficiency virus also have large numbers of infected people who aren't diagnosed, USA Today reported Wednesday.
The states with the greatest number of late diagnoses are Florida, New York, Texas, Georgia and New Jersey, the newspaper said.
"There are tens of thousands of people in the U.S. who are diagnosed late, sometimes too late to save their lives, and certainly too late to help them avoid transmission to others," Jim Curran, dean of Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta, said.
The large number of undiagnosed cases still exists 30 years after the first cases of HIV/AIDS were reported by the Centers for Disease Control in 1981, two decades after the creation of the first HIV test and 15 years after the introduction of effective therapies.
About 236,400 of the 1.1 million people infected with HIV have not been diagnosed, but late diagnoses have declined 5 percent from 2001 to 2007, the CDC said.
"It's not where we'd like to be, but we're moving in the right direction," Kevin Fenton, the CDC's director of HIV/AIDS prevention, said.
