Combating stigma of HIV/AIDS saves lives

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June 27, 2009

Anonymous The Union-Recorder Sat Jun 27, 2009, 08:00 AM EDT

This weekend, communities all over the world will mark National HIV/AIDS Testing Day, a now-annual calendar date set aside to create awareness regarding the importance of testing in combating the disease. The world’s worst pandemic, HIV/AIDS, is especially virulent in our own backyards. According to a recently released study by the National Minority Quality Forum, a nonprofit research organization, 25 of the 48 counties in the United States with the highest rates of AIDS-causing infection are in Georgia.

Both nationally and statewide the numbers reveal much about the disease. According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, African-Americans make up less than 15 percent of the U.S. population, but they comprise nearly half of all new HIV/AIDS cases in the country. While the percentages of new cases have dipped since the disease’s startling discovery decades ago, the numbers in minority communities have increased, making the disease one of the leading causes of death among young African-American women.

In middle Georgia, the counties with the largest proportion of people with the virus are Bibb, Bleckley, Butts and Johnson. Since 2001, the South has led the U.S. in AIDS-related deaths while mortality rates from the dreaded disease have fallen or held steady in the rest of the country. Along with Georgia, the other states with the most elevated rates include Florida, South Carolina, Virginia and the District of Columbia. In fact, our nation’s capital has a rate higher than that of West Africa, shedding light on the misdirected notion that the disease is a global issue that in present day only affects third-world countries.

The HIV/AIDS Research and Policy Institute at Chicago State University estimates that more than 1 million Americans have the illness and about one out of five don’t even realize they have it. Approximately 56,300 are infected annually in this country. The worldwide total of those infected is about 33 million, and about 25 million have died from its complications. It is a disease that respects no socio-economic boundaries, no sexual preference and no age group. In 2007, for example, 2 million people died from it — and more than a half million were children.

Why is AIDS such a vicious illness in the Southern part of the U.S.? Our region has high poverty, uneven medical care, many rural areas with transportation and visibility issues and a population with less health insurance coverage. African-Americans and Latinos are particularly vulnerable to HIV/AIDS because of those factors.

Georgia has received $63.9 million in federal grants for 2009 from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, which supplies funding for health services to those who cannot afford treatment. The tragic fact is that a simple test costing about $8 might be the difference between life and death.

But the stigma against HIV/AIDS is still strong. It often forestalls many people from seeking testing. In Baldwin County, please contact our local health department, 935 Barrow Ferry Road NE, or call (478) 445-4274. As a society, Georgia needs to marshal its energy and resources to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS, to help those with it sustain their lives and to intensify preventive measures and treatment of it. We don’t want to hold the title of “America’s HIV/AIDS Capital” for very long.

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