When you think one’s health is as bad as it can get, think again, as doctors are discovering a new set of complications: people with HIV have a much higher risk of developing certain cancers such as lung, liver, head and neck; doctors fear a cancer epidemic among this group could be coming, according to Atlanta Journal Constitution.

New research presented Tuesday by a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist at a national cancer conference shows that patients with HIV are twice as likely as the general population to get any of the cancers not previously linked to the disease. “We’re seeing people we have treated successfully for HIV at much higher risk” for cancer, said Dr. Kevin J. Cullen, director of the University of Maryland’s Greenebaum Cancer Center. “The reasons aren’t fully understood.”

New numbers show that HIV is spreading because doctors and hospitals are failing to routinely test for the virus. While there's been some improvement, some 1.1 million people in the United States are infected with HIV and nearly 233,000 are unaware of their infection.

“We’re really at the first stages of systematically looking at the epidemic and fully looking at cancer,” said Dr. William A. Blattner, an associate director of the University of Maryland’s Institute of Human Virology. “Before, you died from AIDS, so you didn’t have time to develop cancer. The unusual observation is the cancers are occurring at a much younger age.”
Certain cancers have long been associated with HIV and AIDS. Kaposi’s sarcoma, non-Hodgkins lymphoma and cervical cancer, all linked to viruses, were seen from the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic. It’s the other cancers that are today being seen in much greater numbers.

Today, just 50 to 100 of the country’s 5,000 emergency rooms routinely test for the virus, which requires patient consent, according to research presented November 20 at the Forum for Collaborative HIV Research meeting in Washington.