Black women still stalked by HIV and AIDS

Ellyn Daniel-Ross with Friends for Life hammers AIDS markers in front of First Baptist Church on East Parkway in Memphis, Tenn. First Baptist joins with Greater Lewis Missionary Baptist Church every year to cover the corners at Poplar and East Parkway with over 3,000 ribbons to honor local aids victims. Photo: AP/Wide World photos

According to the Centers for Disease Control, rates of HIV infection among Black women fell 42 percent from 2005 to 2014.

In 2015, 4,524 Black women were diagnosed with HIV, compared to 1,131 Hispanic/Latino women and 1,431 White women, the CDC indicated.

“I’m concerned. I know that the last report coming out of CDC, they indicated that numbers are going down, but what we’re seeing is that Black women in the United States—based on our work and efforts—continue to be negatively impacted by the HIV-AIDS epidemic and that many of the socio-economic factors, as well as what we call environmental exposures, are not adequately being addressed by institutions as well as service providers,” said C. Virginia Fields, president and CEO of the New-York-based National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS, Inc.

She and other experts told The Final Call socio-economic factors related to increased risks for Black women include higher risk of intimate partner violence and related suppression, fears about condom use, no treatment for substance abuse and mental health conditions, and untreated sexually transmitted diseases.

“Our work continues in terms of advocating for programs and policies to reduce the health inequities that are experienced by Black women in America, despite what CDC reports might say.  But this is based on being on the ground, what we’re experiencing in socio-economic factors, environmental exposures, and with that in mind we have to keep working,” Ms. Fields said.

Women have been a second thought in the entire AIDS epidemic and an afterthought in the cultures they live in, said Waheedah Shabazz-El, regional organizing director for Positive Women’s Network-USA. 

“Black women, I think, we’re only about 12 percent of the population but we account for 65 percent of the new cases of HIV in the United States,” she said. 

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Black women make up 6.3 percent (20,597,514) of America’s total population (323,127,513).


Infection rates may be dropping, but one infection is too many in the narrative of an  epidemic that’s been around for 35-years, she argued. “HIV is not new. It hasn’t just gotten here.  People of color are not just impacted because of the color of their skin. People of color are impacted because there are other vulnerabilities to becoming HIV positive—people who are homeless, people who are poor, people who don’t have health insurance, people who can’t read,” Ms. Shabazz-El said.

She’s seen a lot of literature saying HIV is preventable, but what’s left out is that it’s in an ideal world. And that type of messaging renders women feeling bad and like they’re totally at fault, the advocate noted.

An ideal world is free of homelessness, hunger, and mass incarceration, which all undergird the problem, Ms. Shabazz-El said. In the ideal world, communities are stabilized, everybody has health insurance, and age-appropriate reading resources, regardless of technology, she continued.

“HIV should be a human rights priority for all of us, and we should look at it that way because that’s what it is,” she said. Ms. Shabazz-El also stressed that there’s a difference between HIV risks, such as unprotected sex or sharing something that has to do with blood, and HIV vulnerability, such as where people live.

“Some of us live, date, shop, die, marry in the same zip code. We’re likely to pull from a contaminated pool if we’re always in the same zip code,” Ms. Shabazz-El stated.

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