Black Americans have higher rates of HIV than some African countries

Darkfrog submitted, created time 3 months 3 weeks (www.nytimes.com)

According to the Black AIDS Institute, the United States may have a lower incidence of HIV than other countries overall, but U.S. blacks, considered alone, aren't so lucky. With 600,000 African-Americans living with HIV and 30,000 new infections each year, if American blacks were a country on their own, they would rank sixteenth worldwide. What's more, infected blacks are much more likely to die than infected whites, after adjusting for age (the article does not say that it adjusted for socioeconomic status).

The idea that black Americans have a higher incidence of AIDS than some of the countries that receive U.S. AIDS relief may have political ramifications.

For the moment, though, I'm reminded of an article that we posted here on diabetes outcomes. If was discovered that the disparity (socioenomically adjusted) was not because doctors weren't treating their patients the same, but because they were. The article's authors didn't seem to know whether it was a physical or a cultural problem (or both), whether the black and white patients were physically reacting differently to the treatment or whether the doctors' methods and manner were not as well suited to black American culture, but one way or another, the community was under-served.

Keywords: united states race demographics HIV AIDS science and culture politics