By Linda van Beest and Sanne Oving
Sep 25, 2023 at 6:38 AM Update: an hour ago
The number of new people with a positive HIV test in Amsterdam has fallen by at least 79 percent since 2010. The decrease is partly due to the prevention pill PrEP. “We were really waiting for this.”
In 2010, three hundred people in Amsterdam heard that they were infected with HIV. In 2022 this was still 62 people.
The figures are “great news”, says a spokesperson for Soa Aids Nederland. “We were really waiting for that sharp decline. That is mainly the result of the use of the HIV prevention pill PrEP.”
The GGD Amsterdam also partly attributes the decline to PrEP. People can take that pill preventively to prevent themselves from becoming infected. There is increasing enthusiasm for this.
“We are also faster in finding acute infections and treating them immediately,” the GGD says. Amsterdam aims to register no new HIV infections by 2026. To achieve this goal, the focus is on combating stigmas surrounding HIV and the vulnerable position of people with the virus.
Figures have been declining for a long time
There are approximately 24,000 people with HIV throughout the Netherlands. In 2010, there were 1,181 new HIV diagnoses, reports the HIV Monitoring Foundation (SHM) in collaboration with Soa Aids Nederland. In 2021, 427 people were diagnosed with HIV. That is a decrease of about 64 percent.
The national figures for 2022 will be released in November. The spokesperson for Soa Aids Nederland expects that the figures in Amsterdam will show the same trend as those in the rest of the Netherlands. But a direct comparison is difficult, because only about a third of all Dutch HIV infections come from Amsterdam.
The majority of people who tested positive are men who have sex with other men. About fourteen hundred people in the Netherlands do not know that they have HIV.
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Beeld: Getty Images
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Amsterdam Health HIV/AIDS Domestic
2023-09-25 04:38:49
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