Data Description

The Texas HIV surveillance program collects demographic, clinical and risk related information on people living and/or diagnosed with HIV in Texas. The Enhanced HIV AIDS Reporting System (eHARS) captures information over the course of a person's infection. This information helps us understand the overall health of the HIV diagnosed population and is used to support HIV prevention, program planning, and policy development. AIDS has been a reportable condition in Texas since 1983 and HIV name based reporting has been in place since 1999. HIV cases are reported to the Texas HIV Surveillance program from a variety of sources, including hospitals, private physicians, public and private clinics, counseling and testing sites, laboratories, and insurance companies, and other case registries (e.g. TB registry, vital statistics registry).

This webpage describes HIV cases reported to the Texas Department of State Health Services Surveillance Program that were diagnosed through December 31, 2019, reported to the system by December 1, 2020, and not known to be deceased or have moved out of Texas as of December 31, 2019. Data are presented by calendar year.

Measure Information

New HIV Diagnoses - These data represent new HIV diagnoses by calendar year, regardless of stage of infection at diagnosis (acute HIV infection, Stages 1-2, also known as chronic HIV infection, or Stage 3, also known as AIDS). Geographic information is based on a person's residence at diagnosis.

Risk information - Multiple imputation is used to assign mode of transmission for cases reported without risk factors using an algorithm provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (see link below). Multiple imputation is a statistical approach in which each missing transmission category is replaced with a set of plausible values that represent the uncertainty about the true, but missing, values. In this data, multiple imputation has been used in the tables showing estimated transmission categories for diagnoses among adults and adolescents.

Rates - Population denominators used to calculate rates of new diagnoses are provided by the National Center for Health Statistics and are current as of July 1, 2020. Note that the rate of new HIV diagnoses is not the same as incidence rates. Incidence rates would refer to the rate of new HIV infections, which is difficult to determine because most persons are diagnosed months or years after they were first infected.

Data Suppression

Data are suppressed when the population denominator is <50 or the number of cases is <5 or <2x the denominator. For more information on data suppression, please see DSHS' Data Release Policy.

Related Links

Information on Multiple Imputation for Risk Factor Assignment

DSHS HIV/STD Program

Population Denominator Data used in Rate Calculations

Additional Information

National HIV Surveillance Data

E-mail data requests to HIV/STD Program