Shining a Light on America’s HIV Epidemic among Men who Have Sex with Men

It’s accepted as axiomatic that surveillance is the “cornerstone” of public health action [1]. Truthfully, without an accurate and timely assessment of population-specific health indicators and disease outcomes, public health policy makers and practitioners are often obliged to operate blindly at the margins of bias, misconception and ignorance. Historically, an accurate accounting of cases of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) – and later, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections– was deemed so critical to America’s public health response to AIDS that surveillance was memorably referred to as the “conscience of the epidemic” [2]. Extending that metaphor to recent work by Rosenberg and colleagues [3], published in this issue of JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, reveals a truly troubled conscience, indeed.