Disease Surveillance, Mortality and Race: The Case of HIV/AIDS in the United States

Frederikke Frehr Kristensen and Paul Sharp
Additional contact information
Frederikke Frehr Kristensen: University of Southern Denmark

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: The importance of testing and reporting has frequently been stated during the COVID-19 pandemic, but studies on the effectiveness of surveillance are still lacking. We thus turn to the last great epidemic, HIV/AIDS. In 1985 the first blood test for HIV became available, but prior to 1996 no effective medical treatment was available. We exploit the differential rollout of HIV surveillance across US states between 1985 and 2008 and find that HIV reporting helped reduce both AIDS cases and mortality. After the introduction of the effective treatment, HAART, there is no longer a significant effect on mortality, but the effect on reducing cases remains. For blacks, however, the impact on mortality is apparent even after 1996. Surveillance is therefore an important tool for combating epidemics, even in the presence of effective treatments, perhaps due to its impact on the avoidance of risky behavior.

Keywords: AIDS; HIV; surveillance; United States JEL Classification: I18; J18; N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/c ... tions/wp553.2021.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Disease Surveillance, Mortality and Race: The Case of HIV/AIDS in the United States (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cge:wacage:553

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Snape ().