Allegheny County recorded the fewest new HIV diagnoses in its history in 2025, a major public health milestone shaped by decades of HIV activism, expanded access to prevention and testing, and advances in treatment.
According to newly released data from the Allegheny County Health Department, 53 people were newly diagnosed with HIV in 2025. That represents a 32% decrease from 2024 and a 54% decrease since 2016.
“This is an extraordinary public health achievement, and it is important that we recognize what these numbers tell us: public health investments work,” Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato said in announcing the new figures.
The milestone comes more than four decades after the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis, which devastated queer communities while activists, volunteers, health care workers, and people living with HIV built much of the support infrastructure that exists today.
In Pittsburgh, that history includes the Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force, founded in 1985 by Kerry Stoner and a group of volunteers as an offshoot of the Pitt Men’s Study’s Community Advisory Board. Now known as Allies for Health + Wellbeing, the organization was created at a time when people with AIDS faced not only a deadly and poorly understood disease but widespread stigma and discrimination.
Early volunteers helped people find medical professionals willing to treat patients with HIV and AIDS, connected them with legal and government resources, operated an HIV/AIDS information hotline, and provided companionship to people dying from AIDS through its Buddy Program. The organization began offering HIV testing in 1987, two years after the first tests were approved by the FDA.
“We really were first on the scene,” Allies CEO Mary Bockovich said. “PATF was the public health initiative in many ways.”
Today, HIV is a dramatically different diagnosis. Modern antiretroviral treatment allows people living with HIV to live long, healthy lives. People who achieve and maintain an undetectable viral load do not sexually transmit HIV, the scientific consensus commonly known as Undetectable = Untransmittable, or U=U.
People who are HIV-negative also have highly effective prevention options, including pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. AIDS Free Pittsburgh estimates that PrEP use in the region has increased by approximately 400% since the initiative began in 2015.
AIDS Free Pittsburgh, managed by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, now brings together more than 50 partners working on HIV prevention, testing, treatment, education, and outreach. Allegheny County became the second county in the United States to commit to ending the HIV epidemic by 2030.
“This milestone belongs to the entire community,” Richard Smith, vice president of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, said. “The organizations delivering care, the public health professionals coordinating these efforts, and the individuals who sought testing, prevention and treatment all contributed to this historic achievement.”
Progress remains unequal
The record-low number of diagnoses does not mean HIV has disappeared, nor has the progress been experienced equally across Allegheny County.
Black residents have been disproportionately affected by new HIV diagnoses for nearly a decade, with Black individuals 10 times more likely than white individuals to receive an HIV diagnosis, according to the county.
Men who have sex with men continue to account for most new diagnoses, while heterosexual contact accounted for 23% of cases in 2025.
Those disparities underscore why public health officials and HIV advocates are cautioning against treating the new numbers as a reason to pull back funding, outreach, testing, or prevention programs.
“The science and tools exist to end the HIV epidemic,” said Dr. Sarah McBeth, clinical director at UPMC Pittsburgh Area Center for Treatment and medical director at Allies. “We have made tremendous progress because people have had greater access to prevention, testing, treatment and care. Our challenge now is making sure those tools reach every person who can benefit from them, particularly people and communities who continue to experience barriers to care.”
For Allies, the milestone also offers a chance to reflect on how profoundly Pittsburgh’s response to HIV has changed since the darkest years of the AIDS crisis and on the community organizing that helped make that transformation possible.
“This is a moment to celebrate our achievements as a community dedicated to eradicating HIV,” Bockovich said. “We are proud of the role PATF and Allies has played in getting us to this point, and we are looking forward to continuing this important work.”
Allegheny County officials similarly stressed that reaching a historic low is not the same as reaching zero.
“This success is the result of years of sustained investment and hard work, and it will be lost if we stop now,” said Dr. Jillian Irwin, medical director and deputy director for clinical services at the Allegheny County Health Department. “We must seize this moment of progress to accelerate our efforts toward zero new HIV transmissions.”
The county has also launched an HIV and STI dashboard allowing residents, health care providers, researchers, and community organizations to track local data and identify disparities.
For a region that has lived through more than 40 years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, 53 diagnoses represent the possibility of getting closer to a future with no new HIV transmissions.
Getting there, however, will depend on maintaining the prevention, treatment, public health infrastructure, and community work that made this milestone possible.