Last year, San Francisco had only 302 new HIV diagnoses, the lowest recorded number. In 1992, at the epidemic’s peak, there were 2,332 diagnoses. Eighty-two percent of residents with HIV currently are in care, and 72 percent are virally suppressed, results that are much higher than national averages.
The city’s chief strength has been a willingness to go first, to rapidly adopt tactics that work in pilot projects or clinical trials. Two examples of this are the city’s Rapid program that links newly identified HIV positive individuals to antiretrovirals within the first day and the adoption of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in 2013 for all individuals at risk, shortly after the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of Truvada to prevent HIV infection. Read more about San Francisco’s approach to HIV prevention and care in this New York Times article.
