- A new report released by the Center for Disease Control says that the rate of annual new H.I.V. infections in the United States are 40 percent higher than previously thought.

The study concludes that the infection rate is 56,300 per year as opposed to the 40,000 a year that was thought to have been the average rate for the last several years. The new findings, experts say, are not necessarily due to more infections, but are a result of improved tests and a more accurate and new statistical methods

Women ages 19 through 64 should be routinely tested for HIV. That's the new recommendation released Thursday by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG).

In a formal committee opinion published in the August issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the college said obstetrician-gynecologists play an important role in promoting HIV screening for their patients under the recommendations by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

President George Bush on Wednesday approved $48 billion for fighting AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis around the world for next five years.

The amount authorized for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the successful U.S. global AIDS program, is $18 billion more than what Bush had requested. The measure will triple funding for these three diseases

While there have been significant gains in preventing new HIV infections in different countries, the epidemic is far from over in any part of the world, according to a United Nations report.

The 2008 report on the global AIDS epidemic, produced by the Joint U.N .Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), released on Tuesday, is the most comprehensive review of the epidemic to date with 147 countries reporting data on HIV

HIV rates among American blacks are higher than those in impoverished nations that are part of a $15 billion AIDs programs from the United States, and nearly equal to those of African nations, a new report said on Tuesday.

"More Black Americans are infected with HIV than the total populations of people living with HIV in seven of the 15 countries served by PEPFAR [President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief]," Black AIDS Institute chief executive Phill Wilson said in a statement