Despite making up only 13 percent of the population, blacks account for 49 percent of new AIDS cases diagnosed each year, Public Health Director Jacqueline Grant said earlier this week.
With National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day coming up on Thursday, Grant said she wanted to try to raise awareness about the issue.
Factors that make it more difficult to prevent the spread of AIDS among blacks are poverty, stigma associated with the disease and federal AIDS tracking policies, Grant said.
One in four blacks is living in poverty, she said, which increases African Americans’ chances of being exposed to the disease.
“It’s an interplay of all these things that make it more prevalent in black and impoverished communities,” Grant said.
Because such a stigma is associated with the disease, many in the black community refuse to be tested for it, Grant explained. Combine that with federal regulations that do not allow an AIDS patient’s name to be given to a health district unless that person was diagnosed with the disease at the district’s office, and preventing the spread of the disease becomes much more difficult, she said.
“That is the limitation right now that is hurting us,” Grant said, explaining that Public Health gets an identification number only if a patient was not diagnosed in the district.
Black men contract the disease most commonly through unprotected homosexual sex, the sharing of drug needles and unprotected heterosexual sex, in that order, Grant said.
Among women, AIDS is most commonly transmitted through unprotected heterosexual sex and the sharing of drug needles, she said.
Women who are pregnant and have the disease can reduce the chances of transmitting it to their children to as low as 2 percent in a best-case scenario with treatment and as low as 10 percent in emergency cases, she said.
Another factor that makes AIDS among blacks an important issue is the higher mortality rate that it has in the black community versus the non-black community, Grant said.
Black men are eight times more likely than non-black men to be diagnosed with the disease, and black women are 23 times more likely than non-black women to be diagnosed with it, Grant said.
Grant encouraged blacks to educate themselves about the disease and get tested for it if they have been exposed to some of the risk factors for it, which she said included female crack cocaine users and having unprotected sex.
The Public Health Department offers AIDS/HIV testing and education about the disease and treatment referral, Grant said. For more information about HIV/AIDS, visit http://www.southwestgeorgiapublichealth.org
A “Singing for a Cure Gospelfest” will be held at 4 p.m. Feb. 23 at Oakridge Baptist Church to help raise awareness of the AIDS issue in the black community.
The church is at 1708 W. Oakridge Drive, and the event is free to the public.