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Since the discovery of the AIDS virus it has claimed the lives of nearly 450,000 Americans, and nearly 22 million worldwide. Since its discovery, has AIDS has spread worldwide, with 36 million people living with HIV and 900,000 of them living in America. For African American men, they make up almost 57% of the total aids cases. AIDS is the leading cause of death for African American males ages 25-44. Since it was discovery over 20 years ago, AIDS has been diagnosed in over 800,000 Americans, and killed over half. ( Anderson RN, Smith BL. Deaths: leading causes for 2001. National Vital Statistics Reports 2003;52(9): 27–33. Available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/ nvsr52/nvsr52_09.pdf.)
Risk factors for African Americans with HIV are more common than others. Some of these factors have received more publicity than others, and therefore the public has been more knowledgeable about what has been going on. Two very public risk factors are race and ethnicity. Though they are common, they together are not all risk factors for HIV infection.
Black Women are most likely to become infected with HIV infection because of their sexual involvement with black men. They usually aren’t aware of their male partners risk to HIV infection and their doings such as unprotected intercourse with other men, injection drug use, and unprotected sex with multiple female partners. This causes uncertainty as many females do not know the second life that some men lead with other men, and with that, they contract HIV or AIDS dispersing it among females in the African American society. (Hader S, Smith D, Moore J, Holmberg S. HIV infection in women in the United States: status at the millennium. JAMA 2001;285:1186–1192)
Substance abuse using injection drugs is the 2nd leading cause of HIV infection among African American females, and the 3rd leading cause among African American males. This includes sharing any type of paraphernalia from needles to...
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