Blacks hardest hit by HIV in the United States

Paul Simao:

Blacks account for nearly half of the more than 1 million Americans with HIV, according to federal data released on Monday that suggests the battlelines of the nation's AIDS epidemic are marked as much by race as by sexual preference.

An estimated 1,039,000 to 1,185,000 Americans were living with HIV at the end of 2003, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at the 2005 National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta.

Forty-seven percent were black, a disproportionate figure considering that blacks make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population. Whites accounted for 34 percent of the HIV-positive population and Hispanics 17 percent.

Gay and bisexual men made up 45 percent of the total.

"The HIV epidemic, initially most prominent among white gay men, has expanded to affect a wide range of populations, with African-Americans now most severely impacted," Dr. Ron Valdiserri, deputy director of the CDC's HIV, STD and TB prevention programs, told reporters in a conference call.

In a separate analysis of 1,767 men who have sex with men, CDC researchers found that 46 percent of blacks were infected. That compared to 21 percent of whites in the group and 17 percent of the Hispanics, according to the study, which was carried out in five U.S. cities and presented at the conference.

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