A health education specialist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counsels a participant after receiving a free HIV test from AID Atlanta as part of National HIV Testing Day in Atlanta.

One in two gay black men may contract HIV in their lifetimes, new data show

One out of every two black men who have sex with men, and one in four Hispanic men who have sex with men, will be diagnosed with HIV at some point in their lives if diagnosis rates remain the same, a new analysis released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows.

For white men who have sex with men, the rate will be one in 11 people, the CDC said.

CDC officials used the release of the data to call for expanded efforts to stem HIV transmission so the predicted rates don’t become a reality.

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“The prevention and care strategies we have at our disposal today provide a promising outlook for future reductions of HIV infections and disparities in the US, but hundreds of thousands of people will be diagnosed in their lifetime if we don’t scale up efforts now,” CDC official Dr. Jonathan Mermin said in a statement.

Using diagnosis and death data from 2009 to 2013, CDC researchers estimated a person’s lifetime risk of HIV diagnosis by sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and state of residence. Overall, they found that the lifetime risk of an HIV diagnosis for someone living in the United States is one in 99, a drop in disease incidence from the one in 78 rate seen in 2004-2005.

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The analysis also found: