U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff are on the ground in the Bangor area this week to support the response to Penobscot County’s HIV outbreak.
Six CDC staff arrived Monday and will support state and local public health officials until Dec. 19, a CDC spokesperson told the Bangor Daily News. The request for support was put on pause during the government shutdown.
Federal assistance could help Maine public health workers get a clearer understanding of the outbreak’s spread as it grows in Penobscot County. The outbreak, which was identified just over two years ago and has primarily affected people who inject drugs or are homeless, reached 30 cases in October.
The visit also coincides with the first reports of an uptick in HIV cases among people who inject drugs outside the outbreak’s geographic bounds, in Cumberland County, as first reported by the BDN Monday.
“In a small state like Maine where it’s not normal for us to have HIV outbreaks of this size, we’re just not equipped to handle it by ourselves,” Matt Wellington, the associate director of the Maine Public Health Association, told the BDN last month.
“We don’t have the full picture of how widely this has spread. And partly that’s because we don’t have the resources that we need to get that full picture,” Wellington said.
The group of CDC staff, which includes four epidemic intelligence service officers, will interview people affected by the outbreak and “help develop educational resources for providers, response partners, and community members,” according to the CDC.
The spokesperson noted that the CDC “provided initial on-the-ground technical assistance in August 2025.”
During the government shutdown in October, the federal agency paused a request made in September to send field epidemiologists to Penobscot County. A federal Health and Human Services spokesperson told the Boston Globe that travel isn’t authorized during a government shutdown, although the CDC has sent similar support teams to assist with public health emergencies during previous shutdowns.
The help is urgently needed as Bangor’s public health department and the Maine CDC continue working to contain the outbreak, and HIV cases are beginning to spike elsewhere in the state.
Five new cases of the disease were detected this year in Cumberland County among people who inject drugs, a recent Maine CDC analysis found. Public health officials in the Portland area were already preparing to see more HIV cases as the Penobscot County outbreak continued and were working to expand access to testing and other resources.
