HIV Is Still Very Concentrated in America's Cities

The American HIV epidemic isn't raging as fiercely as it once did, but it's far from being stamped out. That much is evident in the above map showing that in just the past few years, many people across the country were getting their first HIV diagnoses – especially in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and all across the Southeast.

This recent assessment of HIV in the United States comes from AIDSVu, a disease-modeling collaboration between the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University and Gilead Sciences, a provider of HIV treatments. Using newly released data from the CDC, the AIDSVu team created the map to show the "leading edge of the epidemic," says Patrick Sullivan, an epidemiology professor at Emory who helms the project. The eye-opening cartography, which represents new HIV diagnoses from 2008 to 2011, reveals that HIV is being heavily transmitted in certain geographic zones; more than 92 percent of the diagnoses occur in only a quarter of U.S. counties.