Blacks are contracting HIV at double the rate that they did in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Researchers and AIDS prevention advocates attribute the surge to drug addiction, poverty, and poor access to healthcare, according to government statistics. At the same time, the HIV infection rate among whites has held steady, causing alarm among some health officials who say the racial gap in the epidemic is widening.
Other troubling statistics indicate that almost half of all infected people in the U.S. who should be receiving HIV drugs are not getting them.
The findings, released at the 12th Annual Retrovirus Conference in Boston Feb. 25, showed an increase in the HIV infection rate from 1 percent to 2 percent of Blacks over a decade. White rates remained level at 0.2 percent, while the overall U.S. rate rose slightly from 0.3 percent to 0.4 percent.
The HIV rates were taken from the National Health and Nutrition Examinations Surveys, which analyze a representative sample of American households and contain the most complete HIV data in the country.