Leon Lieberman was in his 60s when he was diagnosed with HIV. That was nearly 15 years ago. Today, he recently celebrated his 81st birthday and lives in Chicago's North Side. He says he is alive today thanks to treatment of the virus through combination drug therapy.

"Thirty years ago, contracting the virus meant certain death," he told Xinhua. "Everything went into publicizing the condition and coming up with a successful treatment."

Indeed, on World AIDS Day 2012, almost 30 years later, attitudes have changed. There was a time when treatment of HIV and AIDS meant keeping people comfortable until they passed away. Now, people can live out their entire life spans, said Ann Hilton Fisher, executive director of the AIDS Legal Council of Chicago, which provides assistance to Lieberman and about 1,000 other clients annually and has done so for about 25 years.

"Even though there are these great treatment advancements and AIDS has moved away from the headlines, we still have to remind people it's still around," she said. "People are still sharing needles and having unprotected sex. They are still at a great risk of contracting HIV."

While treatment advancements have been made, with drugs like Truvada, infection rates among some populations in the U.S. continue to soar. African Americans face the most severe burden of HIV of all racial/ethnic groups in the United States, according to the Department of Health and Human Services Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Although represented only 14 percent of the U.S. population in 2009, African Americans accounted for 44 percent of all new HIV infections. Compared with members of other races and ethnicities, African Americans account for a higher proportion of HIV infections at all stages of disease--from new infections to deaths, the CDC reports.

In advance of World AIDS Day, the CDC released the Vital Signs report, showing that young people between the ages of 13 and 24 represent more than a quarter of new HIV infections, 26 percent, each year and most of the youth, 60 percent, living with HIV are unaware they are infected. The most-affected young people are young gay and bisexual men and African-Americans.

Overall, an estimated 12,200 new HIV infections occurred in 2010 among young people aged 13-24, with young gay and bisexual men and African-Americans hit harder by HIV than their peers, the report shows. In 2010, 72 percent of estimated new HIV infections in young people occurred in young men who have sex with men (MSM). By race/ethnicity, 57 percent of estimated new infections in this age group were in African-Americans.

Thomas Frieden, CDC director, released the statistics during a conference call last week and said the nation could do better to reduce the numbers. While major steps have been made toward treatment, HIV remains an incurable disease, forcing health care costs to skyrocket. He said prevention is the key.

"HIV, despite the great treatments that we have, remains an incurable infection," he said during the call. "And the cost of care of a single patient is approximately 400,000 U.S. dollars over their lifetime. That means every month we're accruing about 400 million dollars of health care costs, and every year, 5 billion dollars from preventable infections in youth."

"Given even everything we know about HIV, and how to prevent it after more than 30 years of fighting the disease, it's just unacceptable that young people are becoming infected at such high rates. Reducing HIV among young people is a top priority for CDC. This is about the health of a new generation and protecting from an entirely preventable disease," he said.

The U.S. government also addressed World AIDS Day on a global level. During a conference call on Friday, Ambassador Eric Goosby, U.S. Global AIDS coordinator, acknowledged that world is at turning point in the treatment of HIV.

"After 30 years of this virus devastating populations all over the globe, we have gained enough knowledge to understand better both how the virus moves through an individual and damages immune function on an individual basis, but we also now understand the elements, constructs, of infectivity much more explicitly," Goosby said. "So we really do now look at how that virus not only moves through individuals and their own immune (systems) but how that virus now moves through populations."

He talked about steps to take to help contain and reduce the spread of the virus, including the use of condoms; male circumcision, which drops the risk of becoming infected as an uncircumcised male by about 64 percent and the ability of doctors to prevent the transmission of HIV from a pregnant mother to her fetus.

On Thursday, Goosby and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton formally unveiled the blueprint for an AIDS-free generation.

The plan, as defined by Secretary Clinton, hopes to spark a generation where virtually no children are born with HIV; where, as these children become teenagers and adults, they are at far lower risk of becoming infected than they would be today; and where those who do acquire HIV have access to treatment that helps prevent them from developing AIDS and passing the virus on to others.

She has argued that creating an AIDS-free generation is an ambitious, but reachable, goal --and now a policy imperative of the United States.

She mapped out a five-point plan to tackle the problem: treatment and prevention interventions; targeting populations at risk and who suffer most from stigma; promote sustainability and effectiveness; encourage impacted countries to increase efforts to protect and support their own communities and convince donors to meet their funding commitments; and support more research into science for treatment.

VietNamNet/Xinhuanet