Many people across the nation's HIV/AIDS community woke up this morning with a sigh of relief after President Barack Obama’s re-election. Our analysis for the Black AIDS Institute: "Obama’s Re-Election Moves HIV/AIDS Movement Forward."
The stakes were particularly critical for the 1.1 million Americans living with HIV/AIDS or those at risk of infection -- and those people are disproportionately Black and low-income. “Much of this population is uninsured or under-insured,” says C. Virginia Fields, president and CEO of the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS.. “Thousands more people now have health care -- including many people who are HIV positive.”
The South has become the epicenter of Black America’s HIV epidemic. More “new AIDS cases were diagnosed among Black men who have sex with men in the South than in all regions combined,” the Black AIDS Institute reported in "Back of the Line: The State of AIDS Among Black Gay Men in America.” Black women account for nearly three-quarters of all new infections among women in the South.
“Those states have more poverty, larger concentrations of Blacks and often have Republican-lead state governments,” notes Texas Woman’s University assistant professor Kimberly A. Parker, Ph.D., M.P.H. “Sex-education and HIV-prevention education are limited. Many states officially promote ‘abstinence’.”
“That’s why the stakes were so high,” adds A. Cornelius Baker, a member of the President’s Advisory Commission on HIV/AIDS and the senior policy advisor of the National Black Gay Men’s Advocacy Coalition.
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