Doctor Irene Hall with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta helped analyze data from thousands of blood samples collected in 22 states in 2006, and says new technology that measures a specific HIV antibody in the blood, and can tell if a person was infected within a 5-month period, indicates where new infection rates are concerned, the news is worse than researchers expected.

Hall says the bad news doesn't just apply to 2006.

Hall: "We know that HIV infections were never as low as 40 thousand per year. We estimate about 50 thousand infections occurred per year in the early 1990's."

The study says of the approximately 56 thousand 300 new HIV infections in the US in 2006, most occurred among gay men and African-Americans.

The study appeared recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association.