Saturday, February 07, 2009

National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day 2009


Today is National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, a day to raise awareness of the devastating impact that HIV and AIDS have had on Black people in America (and the World):

• When we look at HIV/AIDS by race and ethnicity, we see that African Americans
have more illness (even though blacks account for about 13% of the U.S.
population, they account for about half (49%) of the people who get HIV and
AIDS; shorter survival times (Blacks with AIDS often don’t live as long as people
of other races and ethnic groups with AIDS); and more deaths (for African
Americans and other blacks, HIV/AIDS is a leading cause of death.
• HIV/AIDS affects black children the most. In 2005, 104 (63%) of the 166 children
under the age of 13 diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 33 states were black.
• According to information from 33 states, during 2005, among men, 41% of men
living with HIV/AIDS were black; among women, 64% of women living with
HIV/AIDS were black.
• Of all black men living with HIV/AIDS, the primary transmission category was
sexual contact with other men, followed by injection drug use and high-risk
heterosexual contact.
• Of all black women living with HIV/AIDS, the primary transmission category was
high-risk heterosexual contact, followed by injection drug use.
• Of the estimated 141 infants perinatally infected with HIV, 91 (65%) were Black
(CDC, HIV/AIDS Reporting System, unpublished data, December 2006).
• Of the estimated 18,849 people under the age of 25 whose diagnosis of
HIV/AIDS was made during 2001–2004 in the 33 states with HIV reporting,
11,554 (61%) were Black.
• Since the beginning of the epidemic, blacks have accounted for 397,548 (42%) of
the estimated 952,629 AIDS cases diagnosed in the 50 states and the District of
Columbia.

On Friday February 6th, Black AIDS Institute released an update to last year's ground-breaking report called "Left Behind: State of AIDS in Black America" which pointed out, among other things, that if African-Americans were their own country, they would be the 16th most impacted country in the world by AIDS, ahead of Botswana, Ethiopia, Guyana, Haiti, Namibia, Rwanda or Vietnam — 7 of the 15 countries that receive support from the U.S. Government's anti-AIDS program PEPFAR.

Get Tested! Know your HIV status and the status of your sexual partners.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Those numbers are just staggering and frightening, and, it just burns me up that there is this silence about this, well, silent when those "preacher's" aren't going off on every off the wall tangent and obsessing with the glbt communties other than fighting this epidemic.

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