These advanced new AIDS vaccines are progressing under laboratory conditions, but faced with the challenge of newly emerging strains of AIDS being spread by blacks.
While white scientists desperately try to isolate vaccine-susceptible strains of AIDS in hopes of wiping out the virus, they are faced with the accelerated transmission of the quickly-mutating virus within the black community.
What this means is as follows -- while white scientists are valiantly trying to isolate AIDS as a pathogen and destroy it, black people in the united states of america are spreading it non-stop, allowing it to mutate into newer and deadlier forms.
There has always been a dichotomy in the quarantining of viruses, vs. the rapid spread of emerging diseases within the black community.
We have heard a lot of propaganda about the tuskeegee airmen -- but the truth is that white doctors were legitimately trying to figure out how infectious diseases spread so rapidly among blacks, compared to white, Asians and other control groups.
And now, medical researchers are on the verge of wiping out AIDS, but blacks keep spreading the disease and granting it the opportunity to mutate into new viruses that will be even harder to confront and destroy.
AIDS Epidemic Grips Blacks in U.S.
Monique Moree is the new face of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. The 31-year-old stay-at-home mom, who is black, was pregnant with her third child in 2005 when she found out she had HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.“I was shocked,” Moree, of Summerville, South Carolina, said by telephone. “Being a wife, I didn’t think I could be HIV positive. I hated myself and God. I wanted to kill myself.”
Now Moree takes three pills a day to fight the illness and, so far, has been free of its most damaging effects. While she’s thrived, others she knows haven’t been so fortunate, she said. She blames the government for not doing enough for minority communities increasingly at the center of the U.S. epidemic.
“African Americans have been hit so hard,” she said.
While black men and women are 14 percent of the population, they accounted for 44 percent of 48,000 new HIV cases in 2009, the latest year available for definitive data, according to the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The infection rate in black men was more than six times that in white males, and black women were 15 times more likely to become infected than their white counterparts, the CDC data shows.
New data examining how fast the virus is spreading among black men in hard-hit areas will be presented this week at the first International AIDS Conference to be held on U.S. soil in 22 years. How to target interventions to slow the spread of HIV in these affected communities will be a focus of the meeting, which started yesterday in Washington.
Falling Behind
In one government-funded study presented at the conference today, researchers from the HIV Prevention Trials Network found that the rate of new infection in black gay and bisexual men was 2.8 percent a year, 50 percent higher than in white men who reported having sex with a male. For black gay and bisexual men who are 30 years of age or younger, the rate was 5.9 percent a year, according to the study of 1,553 men in six U.S. cities.
“To say we’re not where we want to be is an understatement,” said Charles Flexner, an infectious disease specialist and clinical pharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who has studied infection rates among black women. “We haven’t achieved the goals we want to.”
In March, Flexner and colleagues reported on a study that found infection rates were five times higher than government estimates for 2,099 black women in six U.S. cities. The data was similar to that reported in parts of Africa where the disease is considered the most virulent, he said.
Evolving Epidemic
A combination of poverty, stigma and lack of access to health care services help propel the epidemic among blacks and other minorities, said Carlos del Rio, chairman of global health at Emory University in Atlanta.
“We have the worst epidemic of any developed country and part of the reason is that some regions of this country are not a developed country anymore,” del Rio said in a telephone interview. “The epidemic has changed dramatically and that is something that is not totally appreciated.”
At Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, doctors are seeing more young black men in their twenties come in with late stage AIDS, said Jeffrey Lennox, chief of infectious disease at Grady Memorial.
“I would estimate it has probably gone up by at least 50 percent compared to five years ago,” and many of the patients he sees are being diagnosed late in the disease, after symptoms have begun to weaken them, Lennox said by telephone.
Unknown Infections
“The people that are transmitting the virus either don’t know that they are infected, or don’t know they should be on treatment, or haven’t accepted treatment,” he said.
One young black man he worked with didn’t report for treatment until he had a CD4 count of less than 10 cells per cubic milliliter, compared to a normal level of above 500. These are a type of immune system cells affected by the AIDS virus.
The man by that point had suffered permanent nerve damage, Lennox said. While the virus is now under control thanks to a cocktail of powerful drugs, the man will live the rest of his life in a wheelchair, he said.
At least eight patients have reported to the hospital in the past year in a similarly late stage of disease, Lennox said.
Researchers aren’t sure why black men with male partners had such higher rates of infection since black men weren’t more likely to engage in unprotected or risky sex than white men, according to a CDC study presented at the meeting. One explanation may be that black men tended to have higher levels of the virus, making them more infectious to other partners, Linda Beer, a CDC researcher, said in a presentation today.
Read more: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-23/drive-to-end-aids-in-u-dot-s-dot-stalls-as-epidemic-grips-minorities
At least eight patients have reported to the hospital in the past year in a similarly late stage of disease, Lennox said.
Researchers aren’t sure why black men with male partners had such higher rates of infection since black men weren’t more likely to engage in unprotected or risky sex than white men, according to a CDC study presented at the meeting. One explanation may be that black men tended to have higher levels of the virus, making them more infectious to other partners, Linda Beer, a CDC researcher, said in a presentation today.
Read more: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-23/drive-to-end-aids-in-u-dot-s-dot-stalls-as-epidemic-grips-minorities
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