Key findings
- It is estimated that 12,440 people were living with HIV infection in Australia by the end of 2000. 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 four years by improvements in treatment for HIV infection.
- 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.
- Around 43% of AIDS cases in 2000, up from 19% in 1996, occurred in people who had been diagnosed with HIV infection within the preceding three months, and had therefore been unable to benefit from antiretroviral therapy or prophylaxis for opportunistic infection.
- The high number of diagnoses of hepatitis C infection recorded in 2000 continued to make this infection the most frequently reported notifiable infection in Australia.
- The per capita number of diagnoses of chlamydia doubled over the past five years, from 45.6 per 100,000 population in 1996 to 90.6 per 100,000 population in 2000 whereas the population rate of diagnoses of gonorrhoea and syphilis in 2000 was 31.3 and 10.3, respectively.