According to the Centers for Disease Control, about one percent of Americans are HIV positive. They also report that twenty percent of gay and bisexual men are HIV positive and a shocking forty one percent do not even know they are infected with the diseases. Being clueless about being infected with HIV opens many doors for new infections among men and women. Jennifer Kates, the director of global health and HIV policy refers to this new trend as a “concentrated epidemic” for some populations. A research and policy organization in Washington D.C., called The Kaiser Family Foundation, is emphasizing more of a government focus on prevention education for people who engage in sexual activity with the same sex and others who are at the highest risk for getting infected. The Centers for Disease Control says that nearly half of people polled never get tested for infections. They recommend that people should get tested once a year to help prevent the spread of more infections.
When I read this article I was surprised because I thought that the percent of people with HIV would be higher, especially between gay and bisexual people. I agree that this is an epidemic and something needs to be done about it. People need to be more educated on sexual disease prevention and need to take more precautions when engaging in risky activity with members of the opposite and same sex. If people would get tested and practice safer sex, then the percent of people infected with HIV and other such diseases would decrease drastically.
http://aids.about.com/b/2010/10/12/population-at-risk-gay-and-bisexual-men.htm
1 comment:
I don't think that every one should go to test for HIV because it will be a waste of resource for the government (if the test is free). Only those at high risk should test for infection: pregnant women, homosexuals, drug addicts, people who have sex with prostitutes.
The article focuses on HIV in the US. Perhaps it is interesting to learn about global HIV. Here I just cite a few statistics from WHO: in year 2008, there were 33.4M people living with HIV, 2.7M were newly infected and 2.0M died of AIDS. (source: http://www.who.int/hiv/data/2009_global_summary.gif)
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