Life
National Black AIDS Awareness Day: Impact of HIV/AIDS on black America
The numbers make it clear: AIDS has devastated black America. Nearly half of all Americans living with HIV are black men and women; 46 percent, three times their 14-percent share of the total population. By the end of 2008, AIDS had killed an estimated 240,627 black men and women.
70 percent of new HIV infections among African-Americans are among men. Of them, 73 percent are men who have sex with men (MSM), a clinical term for gay and bisexual men regardless of how they identify themselves. Young black men between 13 and 29 years old have more new HIV infection than any other age and racial group of MSM.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), most black women (85 percent) who were newly infected with HIV in 2009 acquired the virus through heterosexual intercourse. Black women have 15 times the rate of HIV as white women, and three times as much as Latinas in the United States.
HIV infection and AIDS — more accurately, advanced, untreated HIV disease — are strongly associated with poverty and living in concentrated urban poverty areas in the nation’s major cities. Overall, 46 percent of blacks and 40 percent of Hispanics live in these urban poverty areas, compared with just 10 percent of whites.
Despite the huge impact of HIV/AIDS on black America, the issue remains a touchy one in a community…
