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SPOTLIGHT ON HEALTH
‘We are in a crisis, ’ expert says about AIDS’ impact on blacks
By Dolores Kong
BOSTON GLOBE
Cambridge, Mass. - With AIDS the No. 1
killer of young black men and women, nearly
half of black Americans know someone who
is infected or has died of the disease.
That finding was among the grim national
statistics presented Tuesday at a conference at
Harvard University, prompting meeting
organizers to call upon black leaders and
government officials to do much more to stem
the spread of the virus.
“Our community is at war, at war with a
terrible disease - and equally at war with a
sense of denial among our leadership,” said
Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B.
DuBois Institute at Harvard.
“Let the message go out - business as
usual simply cannot stand,” said Mario
Cooper, founder of Leading for Life, a New
York advocacy group and a member of the
Harvard AIDS Institute International
Advisory Council. “We are in a crisis.”
At the conference “The Untold Story:
AIDS and Black Americans,” organizers and
health officials released a national survey of
blacks about the epidemic, and highlighted the
latest U.S. statistics. While the AIDS death
rate for blacks is starting to decline with new
treatments, it remains high and is not falling as
rapidly as among whites.
Blacks are much more likely than other
Americans overall to know someone who is
infected with HIV or has died of AIDS, to be
very worried about becoming infected, and to
consider AIDS a more urgent problem now
than it was a few years ago, according to the
survey by the Henry J. Kaiser Family
Foundation, a California-based health
philanthropy.
Federal statistics paint an equally alarming
picture. For instance, blacks make up more
than 40 percent of the new AIDS cases, while
they constitute only about 12 percent of the
U.S. population, according to data presented
by Dr. Helene Gayle of the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.
For black men ages 25 to 44, AIDS pulled
ahead of homicide as the leading killer in
1990; for black women of the same age, AIDS
edged out cancer in 1993. In 1996, the last
year for which numbers are available, nearly
150 young black men in 100,000 died from
AIDS, compared with about 50 young white
men in 100,000. The AIDS death rate for
young black women was about 50 per
100,000, compared with the rate for young
white women of less than 10 per 100,000.
The numbers also show that intravenous
drug use accounts for a bigger share of AIDS
cases among blacks than all Americans.
But while IV drug use has been a large
contributor to the AIDS epidemic in the black
community, conference organizers Tuesday
blamed the Clinton administration for failing
to support programs to exchange dirty needles
for clean ones.
Barbara Gomes Beach, executive director
of Boston’s Multicultural AIDS Coalition,
agreed Tuesday with the need to highlight the
statistics, but she criticized the organizers for
not reaching out to the local community more.
“AIDS is not a class issue,” she said.
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VOLUME 5 ISSUE 24
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