ANH
09-12-2008, 05:03 PM
Cry me a river niggers.:violin http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/2008/09/12/black-womens-burden-an-epidemic-of-hiv.html
With her diagnosis, Janice joined the ranks of thousands of black women in the United States who are living with HIV/AIDS. Those ranks have swelled in the years since her son's birth, and black women continue to be struck particularly hard by the virus, new research shows. As of 2005, that group accounted for 64 percent of the more than 126,000 women who were living with HIV/AIDS in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate in 2006 of new infections in black women, moreover, was nearly 15 times that in white women—55.7 infections versus 3.8 infections per 100,000 women, respectively—according to the latest data, which appear in the September 12 issue of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
That study comes on the heels of a dramatic upward revision of the agency's assessment of how rapidly HIV is spreading. In August, the CDC estimated that about 56,300 new infections occurred nationwide in 2006, up from earlier estimates of about 40,000. This week's report breaks down the new infections by race, gender, age, and other demographic measures.
Many assume that HIV primarily affects homosexual men, who are, in fact, heavily afflicted. Nevertheless, high-risk heterosexual contact was the source of 80 percent of newly diagnosed infections in women in 2006, the CDC reports. Yet many black women may not realize when they're having sex with a high-risk partner. In black communities, discussion of homosexuality is largely taboo, and some women report being infected with HIV/AIDS by boy friends or husbands who they later find out were sleeping with men. The so-called down-low phenomenon first garnered widespread attention in 2004 when J. L. King wrote the book On the Down Low: A Journey Into the Lives of 'Straight' Black Men Who Sleep With Men, about his own experiences as a married man who slept with other men but considered himself to be heterosexual.
With her diagnosis, Janice joined the ranks of thousands of black women in the United States who are living with HIV/AIDS. Those ranks have swelled in the years since her son's birth, and black women continue to be struck particularly hard by the virus, new research shows. As of 2005, that group accounted for 64 percent of the more than 126,000 women who were living with HIV/AIDS in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate in 2006 of new infections in black women, moreover, was nearly 15 times that in white women—55.7 infections versus 3.8 infections per 100,000 women, respectively—according to the latest data, which appear in the September 12 issue of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
That study comes on the heels of a dramatic upward revision of the agency's assessment of how rapidly HIV is spreading. In August, the CDC estimated that about 56,300 new infections occurred nationwide in 2006, up from earlier estimates of about 40,000. This week's report breaks down the new infections by race, gender, age, and other demographic measures.
Many assume that HIV primarily affects homosexual men, who are, in fact, heavily afflicted. Nevertheless, high-risk heterosexual contact was the source of 80 percent of newly diagnosed infections in women in 2006, the CDC reports. Yet many black women may not realize when they're having sex with a high-risk partner. In black communities, discussion of homosexuality is largely taboo, and some women report being infected with HIV/AIDS by boy friends or husbands who they later find out were sleeping with men. The so-called down-low phenomenon first garnered widespread attention in 2004 when J. L. King wrote the book On the Down Low: A Journey Into the Lives of 'Straight' Black Men Who Sleep With Men, about his own experiences as a married man who slept with other men but considered himself to be heterosexual.