African Americans were just as badly affected by HIV/AIDS as the white http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2989 community
Faced with an http://www.wvwnews.net/index.php and Latinos, the nation urgently needs to begin a domestic program to curb the spread of the disease, according to a nationally recognized AIDS policy expert.
“It’s not on the radar screen. There are not enough voices being raised,” said Dr. Beny J. Primm, executive director of the Addiction Research and Treatment Corp. in Brooklyn, N.Y.
More than 40,000 new cases of HIV/AIDS are reported each year in the U.S., and 60 percent of the people afflicted are African American, he said.
Primm, a former federal health official in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, was in Hartford Sunday to receive an award from the Greater Hartford chapter of the Links Inc., an organization of professional women http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=966.
…The Links group honored Primm because of his contributions in the fields of substance abuse, domestic violence and AIDS…Primm has focused, in part, on the connection between AIDS and the spread of the disease through intravenous drug use.African Americans were just as badly affected by HIV/AIDS as the white gay community, which had significant access to the press, he said during an interview before the award ceremony. But the disease’s spread among African Americans, particularly African American women, has not been given the same kind of attention, Primm said.
The numbers of HIV/AIDS cases in some U.S. cities, he said, are reaching the levels health experts are charting in developing areas of the world.
In Washington, D.C., for example, one in every 16 people between the ages of 18 and 44 is infected with HIV, Primm said. In Harlem in New York City, he noted, one in seven black men is infected, and in Manhattan, one in 14, between the ages of 34 and 45.
“The numbers … are skyrocketing” among African Americans and Latinos, he said, “and are at emergency numbers in African American women.”
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