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Of the estimated 875,500 people who have developed AIDS in the United States since that dread diagnosis came along, roughly 56 per cent have died. Some 385,000 are alive and coping with the disease.

Many more are certain to develop it. An estimated 850,000 to 950,000 Americans are already infected with the precursor virus, HIV.

US progress against AIDS is marked by how close we can come to freezing those numbers -- and what we learned last week is that we aren't anywhere close. The US Centers for Disease Control announced that new AIDS cases jumped from 41,227 diagnosed in 2001 to 42,136 in 2002. That increase sounds slight but it's alarming to epidemiologists. It shows that the trend is in the wrong direction.

Particularly disturbing is the estimated 7.1 per cent increase in HIV infections among gay and bisexual men. It's the third year in a row that this number has risen, suggesting that vigilance has relaxed. Complacency is sparking a resurgence of this terrible disease.

The wider public may find this baffling. An unrealistic expectation prevails that education about AIDS can just be delivered once and the message should sink in. But of course it doesn't work that way. Many young gay men today haven't experienced the bedside vigils, the wasting-away of their friends and never-ending funerals that made an older generation vigilant.

The availability of medicines to stall AIDS has led younger men to see the disease as something survivable, maybe even not so terrible. This is what Thomas Bruner, executive director of the Cascade AIDS Project, calls "treatment optimism," and it's among a number of delusions that help to buoy denial.

What Bruner also sees is: classic youthful invincibility; it's-going-to-get-me-anyway fatalism; and some genuine confusion among some people with HIV or AIDS that they can't pass the disease along if they still feel healthy.

Last year, the Cascade AIDS Project provided services to 1,591 people infected with HIV or with full-blown AIDS. Most, about 1,300, live in the Portland metropolitan area, and roughly two-thirds are gay or bisexual men.

Although our area has not yet seen a national-level surge in HIV infections, syphilis cases among gay men have quadrupled here. That's an unsafe-sex indicator that typically signals a surge of HIV infections ahead.

If people expected a magical stopping point when the education process was finished, they were wrong, says Bruner. There's a new target audience, previously too young or just not listening, tuning in all the time.

AIDS remains a disease without a cure. The new numbers show that the campaign against the disease -- our effort to outwit it via education -- has to be continually renewed and reinforced.

The alternative to teaching is death.

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