The term Human Immunodeficiency Virus is commonly known as (HIV), which is a virus that attacks the immune system of humans by destroying the amount of CD4 cells in their bodies. Without CD4 the human body is unable to fight against diseases, which can lead to Acquired Immune deficiency syndrome known as AIDS for short. The first case of the HIV/AIDS virus in the U.S. occurred in the early 1980’s. The first spark of the virus was found in San Francisco with couple of homosexual Caucasian American males. Today African Americans account for the largest proportion of HIV and AIDS in this country, represent approximately 13% of the U.S. population, but accounted for an estimated 44% of new HIV infections in 2010(the last year a study was conducted). Over the past several years or so the U.S. have seen a striking increase in HIV infection rates amongst adolescents (age 13 to 17) and young adults between the ages of eighteen to twenty-four. “[in] 2010, 72 percent of the estimated 12,000 new HIV infections in young people occurred in young men who have sex with men, and nearly half of new infections were among young, black males” (FOX NEWS). Dr. Kevin Fenton who’s the director of the Nation Center for HIV/AIDS prevention at the CDC said the set of new data they received are stark and worrying.
For the past thirty years the HIV virus within the black community has seen a massive spread, based on the lack of prevention efforts. From studies, it is clear to say HIV has, created a serious health crisis among black adolescent males and young adults. Americans need to come forward and push for prevention efforts that will target all Africans Americans regardless of their sexual orientation in order to help slow down the spread of this urgent...
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"ENDGAME: AIDS in Black America." PBS. PBS, 10 July 2012. Web. 07 Nov. 2013.
"Infected and Unaware: HIV Hitting America's Youth." Fox News. FOX News Network, 28 Nov. 2012. Web. 29 Oct . 2013.
Priest, Dana. "U.S. Is Urged to View AIDS as Racial Issue; Panel Points to Social, Economic Factors: [FINAL Edition]." Remote Database User Authentication, Montgomery College Libraries/"ProQuest" Washigton Post Digital, 12 Jan. 1993. Web. 04 Nov. 2013.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “U.S Department of Health and Human Services(HHS), Inventory of programs, Activities and Initiatives Focus on Improving the Health of Individuals with Multiple Chronic Conditions” Under the direction of Anand Parekh, MD,MPH, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health (Science and Medicine), Office of the Assistant secretary of Health. September 2011. WEB 22 NOV 2013.
AIDS/HIV was first recognized as a new disease in the US when clinicians in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco began to see young, homosexual men with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi 's sarcoma (KS), unusual diseases for young adults which were not known to be immunosuppressed. These discoveries led to increased fear throughout the US since many people didn’t know what caused AIDS, how it could be contracted, or even what to call it.
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is a chronic, potentially life-threatening condition caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). AIDS weakens the immune system hampering the body’s defense mechanisms. AIDS is known to be a deadly disease, especially if it is not treated in a timely manner. AIDS and HIV is an epidemic that is increasing among the African American population with roots tracing back to Africa, AIDS and HIV needs greater exposure and more awareness within the African American community and in the homosexual community.
With the emergence of HIV over thirty years ago, it has been estimated that more than half a million people have died from AIDS in the United States. As of 2006, approximately 2.2 million people in the United States are HIV positive with roughly 50,000 new infections per year. The most alarming statistic is that 20% of people that are HIV positive are unaware, making them susceptible to passing on the infection unknowingly. Public health programs have been working since the emergence of HIV to educate the populations, trying to give them the knowledge and the tools to protect themselves from infection. As more information has been collected about the transmission of HIV and the relevant social behaviors of susceptible populations leading to transmission, public health programs have been adjusting their messages and methods.
According to the CDC, almost 1.1 million people in the United States have HIV, yet almost 20% of those people are unaware that they are living with the condition (CDC, 2013c). When the HIV broke out almost 30 years ago in the United States, the number of new cases in a year was 130,000. Now, each year the new number of cases being presented is approximately 50,000 (CDC, 2013c). In locations like Sub-Saharan Africa, the statistics are higher. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) states, “In 2011, an estimated 23.5 million people living with HIV resided in sub-Saharan Africa, representing 69% of the global HIV burden” (UNAIDS, 2012). The World Health Organization (WHO) reinforces this point by saying, “Sub-Saharan Africa is the most affected region [of HIV], with nearly 1 in every 20 adults living with HIV. Sixty nine per cent of all people living with HIV are living in this region” (WHO, 2013a). The statistics of infected people living in the United States is alarming but there are other countries, like Africa, which have higher rates of HIV due to very limited
Walter, HJ & Vaugh RD. AIDS risk reduction among a multi-ethnic sample of urban high school students. Journal of the American Medical Association. 1993.
Many African Americans are at high risk of the HIV infection and many of them are unaware or have a lack of access to care, education and prevention services. With African American’s making up fourteen percent of the population, they make up almost half of all people infected with HIV. According to, Exploring the Social and Community Context of African American Adolescents’ HIV Vulnerability (2013), African American communities bear the burden of disproportionately high rates of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) nationwide. Although African Americans represented only 14% of the U.S. population, they comprised 44% of new HIV cases in the United States in 2009 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2011). African American adolescents (ages 13 to 19 years) accounted for 69% of HIV/AIDS diagnoses in 2010, though they represented only 15% of this age group population in the United States (CDC, 2012a). Research suggests that a complex set of factors, including individual, interpersonal, and environmental, put African American youth at higher risk for acquiring HIV (Lightfoot, A. F., Sparks, A., Turner, K., Griffith, T., Jackson, M., & Woods-Jaeger, B, 2013). High risk behavior is a leading factor in the African community in regards to HIV/AID, and African American adolescents are reported to be the highest prevalence engaging in sexual intercourse in comparison to other adolescent ethic groups. Although individual risk behavior is important in HIV transmission, it is not the only factor liable for HIV disparities among African American adolescence.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, (2012). Refocusing national attention on the hiv crisis in the united states. Retrieved from website: http://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/docs/2012/AAAFactSheet-0712-508c.pdf
...namer, David. J, and Julie Honnold. "AIDS Education and Prevention." Differences in disclosure of sexuality among African American and White gay/bisexual men: Implications for HIV/AIDS prevention. 12.6 (2000): 519-531. American Pschological Association. Web. 4 Dec. 2009.
For over thirty years HIV and AIDS have presented historic challenges to the human nature, especially to our planet’s public health, scientific and medical communities. It is estimated that just in the United States between 900.000 and 950.000 persons are living with HIV and about one forth of those infected have not yet been diagnosed and are unaware of their infection. The number of people with AIDS is increasing as effective new drug therapies keep HIV-infected persons healthy longer and dramatically reduce the death rates. However in spite of extremely beneficial advances in the field of HIV-AIDS treatment in recent years the epidemic is far from being over. The Center for Disease Control in the United States has estimated that about 40.000 people become infected every year and most of these are young persons under the age of 25. The epidemic of HIV is severely impacting the communities of color, particularly young men and women. Roughly about sixty percent of new infections continue to be among men having a sexual intercourse with another man. The National HIV Prevention Committee suggests that there has been resurgence in unsafe behaviors among some communities of gay men. With all the research and evidence available from various government and non-profit organizations dealing with HIV and AIDS prevention far too many Americans believe that the epidemic is over in the United States. Among minorities, women, and the poor the worst may yet to be come. African Americans represent 12 percent of the American population, which is about 35.000.000 people, but about 50 percent of the new HIV cases (www.statehealthfacts.org). In the United States some 80 percent of all women infected are women of color. In addition African-American women are becoming infected at younger age compared to their white peers primarily through heterosexual contact. Hispanics present about 14 percent of the US population, about 40.322.930 people, and 20 percent of HIV-AIDS cases. The HIV infection rate among Native Americans is approximately one and a half time that of whites and they die from AIDS much faster than the whites due to late diagnosis.
Millett, G., et al. "Focusing “down low”: Bisexual black men, heterosexual black women, and HIV risk." Journal of the National Medical Association 97.7 (2005): 52S-59S.
As the AIDS epidemic in the United States advanced into the 1990s, it became clear that AIDS had a new target population. AIDS was no longer strictly a gay disease but was leaking into the general heterosexual population as well. Moreover, as the decade progressed, new cases of HIV infection were being increasingly identified in poor, minority communities. While the focus of the AIDS epidemic shifted from the high-profile male homosexual population to poor, minority communities, political activism and financial support for the fight against AIDS also began to decline. With the new limitations set by decreased public support and decreased financial resources, policy-makers, humanitarian organizations, and AIDS activists began to analyze how best to extend AIDS-related resources to these new target populations.
The first national, co-ordinated AIDS education campaign was not launched until 1988, since then there has been an increase in trying to educate all people in the United States about HIV and AIDS prevention. Unfortunately, the number of infections has not seen much decline and actually some rise in the number of infections in the past decade within two specific groups: young gay men and young women of color.
"Much more work with low-income rural women of color needs to be conducted regarding HIV prevention needs and how best to respond to those needs," lead study author Dr. Richard A. Crosby of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, told Reuters Health. "This is an important population of women who can clearly benefit from increased HIV prevention efforts."
HIV is an epidemic that still currently has no cure, however knowledge of the disease is much more extensive than what was known thirty years ago. Today there is much more knowledge with regard to prevention, diagnosis, and medical management. Nearly 50000 cases are newly diagnose every year, and this number has been stable for the past decade. In 1986 a study was conducted on 375 gay men in San Francisco by Dr. Sol Silverman and the clinical findings were recorded. Due to the wealth of knowledge about the disease that was not known back then there are a number of difference in the epidemiology of the disease. The proportion of gay men and women represent a far smaller number than they did when the study was initially conducted. However, the disease still disproportionately attacks nonwhites and Hispanics, who represent 62% of men and 82% of women. A key reason for the high transmission of HIV is due to the fact that most people do not know they are carrying the disease. In fact, nearly half of HIV transmission are due to these people (Abel et al, 2013).
The emergence of HIV/AIDS is viewed globally as one of the most serious health and developmental challenges our society faces today. Being a lentivirus, HIV slowly replicates over time, attacking and wearing down the human immune system subsequently leading to AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) at which point the affected individual is exposed to life threatening illnesses and eventual death. Despite the fact that a few instances of this disease have been accounted for in all parts of the world, a high rate of the aforementioned living with HIV are situated in either low or medium wage procuring nations. The Sub-Saharan region Africa is recognized as the geographic region most afflicted by the pandemic. In previous years, people living with HIV or at risk of getting infected did not have enough access to prevention, care and treatment neither were they properly sensitized about the disease. These days, awareness and accessibility to all the mentioned (preventive methods, care etc.) has risen dramatically due to several global responses to the epidemic. An estimated half of newly infected people are among those under age 25(The Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic). It hits hard as it has no visible symptoms and can go a long time without being diagnosed until one is tested or before it is too late to manage.