National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, being marked Saturday, is a good moment to reignite the conversation over a crisis that should have ended years ago.
Despite representing only 13% of the U.S. population, African-Americans account for nearly half of all new HIV infections each year. True, the impact of HIV varies across the black community — HIV infection rates have declined among injection drug users, black women, and black infants born to seropositive mothers. And new HIV infections among black heterosexual men are stable.
But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recorded a troubling spike in new HIV infections among black gay and bisexual men. Black gay men have been the only black population in which new HIV cases have been growing since 2001. Indeed, the CDC estimates that one in three black gay men in major U.S. cities is HIV positive.
HIV deaths among African-Americans drop 18%, CDC says
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