A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released this week found that only 40% of people have been tested for HIV.

Contrary to recent reports, Bernard Branson of CDC’s division of HIV/AIDS prevention said that efforts to test people who are in high-risk groups for HIV had been successful. Branson emphasized the need to reach the remaining 25 percent of Americans who are HIV positive but unaware they are infected. New methods are needed in order to get more people tested.

“In the past, people associated HIV with drug use and men who have sex with men,” Bernard Branson said. ‘But the epidemic is changing, and there is an increased proportion of cases that have been reported in heterosexual transmissions and among women.”

The CDS report found that in 2006, just 40.4% of adults in the U.S. between the ages of 18 to 64-years old were tested for HIV. From 2001 through 2006, the testing rate stalled. Currently, just 40 percent of adults in the country have been tested for the fatal and incurable virus.

“This study showed that through strategies that only targeted people who were especially at risk, the total number of people getting tested remained flat,” Branson said. To support this theory, studies have found that people who know they are infected with HIV are more likely to avoid spreading the disease.

These results come after the CDC released a report saying that far more Americans are being newly infected with the AIDS virus every year than previously estimated – 56,000 a year compared with past CDC estimates of 40,000 infections a year.

The CDC urged for “new strategies such as expanded screening in health-care settings” to have an early diagnosis of HIV and recommended that the HIV test should become a standard test during an ordinary doctor’s visit. CDC scientists began recommending universal HIV testing in September 2006 to reduce the number of Americans who are infected with the virus but are unaware or it and, as a result, risk spreading it.

However, preventing the infection is a key point in controlling the AIDS epidemic, with safe sex and needle-exchange programs that should help slow the spread of the virus.

About 33 million people worldwide are infected with the virus and 2.7 million new cases were reported in 2007, according to UNAIDS. Over three quarters of these deaths occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, which remains the epicenter of the global malady. Researchers believe the virus originated in this region during the twentieth century.

The virus that has killed more than 25 million people including 330,000 children is spread in blood, semen, breast milk and other bodily fluids. Health care workers can reduce exposure to HIV by employing precautions to reduce the risk of exposure to contaminated blood.

But the majority of HIV infections are acquired through unprotected sexual relationships between partners, one of whom has HIV. Only male and female condoms can reduce the risk of heterosexual HIV transmission. HIV affects nearly every organ system. Patients with HIV infection have substantially increased incidence of several malignant cancers and tuberculosis.