AIDS battle passes 20 years

America’s been battling the H-I-V virus for two decades now and despite new drugs and public awareness campaigns, the rate of new cases hasn’t dropped significantly. The Iowa public health department reports 13-hundred Iowans have been diagnosed with AIDS since the early ’80s, and half of them have died. Assistant state epidemiologist Dr Court Lohff says it would be nice to say there are no new cases, but they can’t.For the last several years, 100 cases a year have been reported in Iowa. And it’s similar to the continuing progress of the disease elsewhere.Lohff says despite all we know and the public information about the disease, new infections occur across the country and around the world. Though new drugs have given healthier and longer lives to people infected with the H-I-V virus, Dr. Lohff says they can be dangerously over-confident about that.He says they may assume they can’t pass on the disease, but they are indeed still infected, and contagious.