When discussing last year’s HIV outbreak in the small city of Austin, Indiana, public health officials have repeatedly said that what happened in Scott County could have happened in any county in the Hoosier state.
Preventive efforts are where resources are better spent, said Matthew Clay of Centerstone, rather than spending millions of dollars reacting to 180 newly diagnosed cases of human immunodeficiency virus, which is what the Scott County Health Department, Indiana State Department of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did over the course of a yearlong investigation.
“We can pull together, work together to reduce the likelihood of this happening again,” said Clay, program manager for Centerstone, a behavioral health network with an office in Bloomington.
But education and testing for sexually and intravenous drug-transmitted diseases such as HIV and viral hepatitis is limited, especially for young people, public health workers say. The greatest portion of newly reported cases of HIV in 2014 — 47 percent — were among Hoosiers ages 20 to 29, according to the Indiana State Department of Health. Nine percent of HIV diagnoses were among young adults ages 13 to 19.
Monroe County has the 11th-highest rate of HIV of all Indiana counties, according to Centerstone.
“People have an expectation of what a drug user looks like,” said Monica Miley, a health educator for Positive Link, an Indiana University Health Bloomington Hospital Community Health program that provides both HIV/AIDS prevention services and direct services for those with HIV. “Injection drug use is going up in younger populations.”
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