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CDC: Young Gay Blacks Unaware of Unsafe Sex Danger
Posted by Administrator
A small survey of young, HIV-positive Southern black men who have sex with men found that they didn’t think they’d be infected if they had unprotected sex. The survey, conducted by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a U.S. government agency, shows that more than half of the 29 the men said they had engaged in unprotected anal sex in the year before they were infected and had had sex with slightly older men.
"The vast majority of the young men said they had not thought that they would ever be infected," reports The New York Times. The rates of HIV infection among young black gay men are rising much higher than for other populations, and the South is especially affected.
"We need to make sure that H.I.V. infection does not become a rite of passage for young black men who have sex with men," Dr. Alexandra Oster, one of the authors of the survey, told the Times.
The study has its genesis in a 2007 Mississippi State Department of Health notice to the C.D.C. that new H.I.V. diagnoses had spiked at an STD clinic serving Jackson. The number of newly diagnosed H.I.V. cases among all black men in the Jackson area had increased 20 percent between 2004-2005 and 2006-2007, but infections among those ages 17 to 25 had jumped 45 percent, according to the Times.
The men in the survey ranged from 17 to 25; all had tested positive since 2006 and had had sex with other men. Twenty reported having unprotected anal sex with a man during the year before their positive HIV results; 16 had male partners who were 26 or older.
"Having older sex partners increases the risk of infection because older men are more likely than younger men to be infected," according to the Times. Only three of the 29 men thought it likely they would acquire H.I.V. during their lifetime. More than half thought it unlikely or very unlikely, the survey found.
"These men may have taken what they believed were reasonable steps to reduce their risk, but unfortunately the rates of H.I.V. infection are so high in this population that sometimes people have partners who are H.I.V. positive and do not know it," CDC AIDS Prevention Director Richard Wolitski told the paper.
EDGE Editor-in-Chief Steve Weinstein has been a regular correspondent for the International Herald Tribune, the Advocate, the Village Voice and Out. He has been covering the AIDS crisis since the early ’80s, when he began his career. He is the author of "The Q Guide to Fire Island" (Alyson, 2007).
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