HIV cases double for blacks in the US

In a scary turn of HIV and AIDS statistics, HIV cases have doubled over the last decade among blacks while holding steady for whites. Newsday reports:

The HIV infection rate has doubled among blacks in the United States over a decade while holding steady among whites - stark evidence of a widening racial gap in the epidemic, government scientists said Friday.

The findings were released at the 12th Annual Retrovirus Conference, the world's chief scientific gathering on the disease. Thursday evening, research was presented on the aggressive HIV strain recently discovered in a Manhattan patient. His doctors, led by Dr. David Ho at Rockefeller University, said the strain has disturbing traits that help it quickly progress to AIDS while resisting drug treatments: It grows well in the lab, unlike most drug-resistant strains, and it causes cells that it infects to clump together, allowing them to kill other cells.

Since neither blacks nor gays generally vote Republican, the Bush Administration will continue to ignore the statistics and the science. In fact, I halfway expect the evangelicals to stand up and use their old, sick "fornicators and sodomites deserve what happens to them" argument for letting this health epidemic go underfunded.

Tag: AIDS