HIV/AIDS isn’t over
The following article also appears in Bay Windows, New England’s Largest GLBT Newspaper.
First the good news: Last week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) did something that would have been unthinkable a mere 12 months earlier: it analyzed the rates of new HIV and syphilis infections based on population size, with one of the populations being men who have sex with men.
Why would this not have happened a year ago? Because this is the sort of reality-based science and research that rarely made it to public view under the Bush Administration. When you consider the Obama Administration’s national campaign launched last April to refocus national attention on HIV/AIDS; its commitment of resources to LGBT groups to ensure that we are accurately counted in the 2010 U.S. Census; and its very public crunching of numbers in order to measure the HIV and syphilis infection rate disparities between men who have sex with men, and women and heterosexual men, it is clear that — certain political battles aside — this administration takes us seriously.
Now the bad news: men who have sex with men are 44 times more likely to contract HIV than other men and 40 times more likely to contract HIV than women. They are 46 times more likely to contract syphilis than other men and 71 times more likely than women. Given how much the science, advocacy, policy, and research communities know about how HIV and syphilis is transmitted, it is simply depressing that gay and bisexual men are so vulnerable to infection.
So what can be done about it? Lots. (Read on …)
