HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STDs & Tuberculosis

• Helped reduce cases of tuberculosis (TB) in the U.S. from 25,103 in 1993 to 9,945 in 2012.
• Determined that a medication used to treat HIV infection can also lower the risk of getting infected with HIV by nearly 50% among people who inject drugs.
• Launched the first national, multilingual hepatitis B campaign for Asian Americans, who represent more than half of the 1.2 million Americans living with chronic hepatitis B.
• Expanded routine HIV screening in healthcare facilities to reduce the number of infected people who spread the disease to their partners.

More Americans with HIV know their status than ever, but there is still much work to do.

When Esteban and Danielle decided to adopt, the South Carolina couple was particularly interested in parenting an international child. After working with an adoption agency for two years, they finally received exciting news that two young Ethiopian girls were available.

However, their excitement turned to worry when they arrived in Ethiopia and were told that the older girl had tuberculosis (TB). After an evaluation found she could not infect anyone else, the child was cleared for travel. Back home in South Carolina, Esteban and Danielle followed up with their doctor. A chest x-ray of their child revealed a dark spot. More bad news came—it was multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB), which requires a more difficult treatment of expensive drugs.

Fortunately, the family received valuable support from the South Carolina TB Control Program. A TB control nurse, connected them with a program that provides free treatment and arranged for a school nurse to manage the girl's treatment.

There are hundreds of thousands of cases of MDR TB around the world, with less than 25% of the existing cases worldwide detected. This lack of treatment represents a major threat to important gains in global TB prevention control. CDC works to protect Americans and the world from drug-resistant diseases.