New York, NY – Even with treatment advances, an HIV diagnosis can be devastating news – as many Americans still consider it a death sentence. People who are in the health and social services professions are not immune from being paralyzed.
“I just felt so much shame so much guilt” say Roxanne who did not reveal her last name. She worked in the welfare department of a major US city when she tested postive for HIV “I didn’t want to share because I knew how I would be treated inside the field and out so I just kept it a secret.”
It appears the stigma of having the illness may be exposing more people to actually getting sick as a new study suggests the infections rates among black women in the US is five times higher than reported by the Centers for Disease Control.
The new data comes from the ISIS study that started in 2009. The at-risk women were from six urban areas of the United States that have some of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS. They’re in Baltimore, Atlanta, Raleigh-Durham, N.C., Washington, D.C., Newark, New Jersey and here in New York City.
The research included 2099 women ages 18 to 44 who had never had a positive HIV test. Eighty-eight percent of the study participants were black, 12 percent Latina. At the time of enrollment, researchers found that 32 women were infected with HIV but were unaware of their status.
Within one year of joining the study, 0.24 percent of the women tested positive for the disease. That rate is five times higher than the CDC’s previous estimate of HIV rates in black American women. This puts African American women in these cities in the same risk group as women in parts of Africa where the disease is rampant.
