The findings stunned even the researchers doing the work – who already knew that the HIV epidemic in the United States is worse among blacks, and that young black women have a special risk.
“The fact that the rate for infections in these women is something like the rate in Congo is something that ought to get peoples’ attention,” Dr. Charles Flexner, a clinical pharmacologist and infectious-disease expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who led the study, said in an interview.
“What this suggests is that you can’t guess what is happening in any particular neighborhood based on overall estimates. What this is telling us is that there are urban hot spots for HIV acquisition. Those are places where we really ought to be focusing our prevention efforts.”
“Most of these women were not active injection-drug users. The vast majority were heterosexual.” Some were trading sex for drugs such as crack, but not all.
“A lot of these women are just young, sexually active folks in their teens, 20s, and 30s whose sexual partners are HIV infected and they don’t know it,” Flexner added. More than 40 percent of the women had no idea whether their sex partners had HIV.
“I am hoping that this will raise consciousness about the fact that we still have an HIV epidemic going on in the U.S.,” Flexner said.
Read on at:
http://www.nationaljournal.com//healthcare/aids-rate-among-urban-black-women-stuns-researchers-20120308
