Key findings
- It is estimated that there were 12,000 people living with HIV infection in Australia by the end of 1999. The decline in annual AIDS incidence observed since 1994, due to the fall in HIV transmission rates a decade earlier, has been substantially accelerated over the past three years by improvements in therapy.
- Transmission of HIV in Australia continues to occur primarily through sexual contact between men. There is no evidence of recent change in rates of transmission via this route, or any increase in the very low rates of transmission through injecting drug use, or heterosexual contact.
- The high number of diagnoses of hepatitis C infection recorded in 1999 continued to make this infection the most frequently reported notifiable infection in Australia.
- Over the past five years, the population rate of diagnosis of gonorrhoea has increased substantially whereas the rate of diagnosis of syphilis has remained relatively stable. The rate of diagnosis of chlamydia has more than doubled over the past five years whereas the number of diagnoses of donovanosis has dropped from 82 in 1995 to 15 in 1999.
- Indigenous people continue to be diagnosed with these infections at much higher rates than non-Indigenous people.