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St. Louis American: Blacks are the 'Invisible People'' at AIDS Conference
July 15, 2004
By: George E. Curry, NNPA Editor -in-Chief
BANGKOK, Thailand (NNPA) - Although African-Americans represent more than half of all new AIDS cases diagnosed in the United States each year, they were virtually invisible among the hundreds of presenters at the 15th International AIDS Conference.
"The theme of this year's global conference AIDS conference is 'Access for all,'" observes Phill Wilson, executive director of the Black AIDS Institute, a Los Angeles-based HIV/AIDS policy center. "I keep looking for the fine print. I can't find it, but it must be there. Access for all - except African-Americans."
"More than 21,000 African-Americans are diagnosed with AIDS every year and more than 185,000 are living with AIDS today," Wilson says in a statement. "Those numbers might pale in comparison to what we're seeing in South Africa and Zimbabwe. But tell that to Keith Cylar, an African-American activist with AIDS who died two months ago. Tell it to Jonathan Perry, a student at Johnson C. Smith University in North Carolina, who was infected his freshman year in college."
Pernessa C. Seele, founder and CEO of Balm in Gilead, a nongovernmental New York-based that mobilizes the faith community in the U.S. and Africa, suspects there is a racial component to lack of Blacks playing key roles in the conference.
"When this was seen as a primarily a gay, White male disease, there was all kind of interest in what was happening in the United States," says Seele. "But now that most of those contracting HIV/AIDS are Black, no one seems to care."
Wilson says that of more than 5,000 presentations at the conference - 445 oral presentations and 5,232 posters - only 10 were related to African-Americans.
"Whether it's intention or not, it definitely sends a message that AIDS does not impact Black people," Wilson says. "It undermines our efforts for prevention and it undermines our effort to get people into treatment. Here we are at the most important HIV scientific conference in the world and we're absent."
Wilson says he discussed the paucity of Black presentations with conference organizers.
"When I asked on of the conference organizers about the dearth of information concerning African-Americans, I was reminded that the Black epidemic is a domestic one and told this is a global conference," Wilson recalls. "There is no global epidemic; all epidemics are domestic and the African-American one is no less legitimate than any other. You can drive through parts of Washington, D.C., or Detroit or East St. Louis and see images that remind you of Johannesburg, Harare or Nairobi. In fact, some African-American sub-populations, the AIDS rate rival those of sub-Saharan Africa."
He said Blacks are caught between two major perceptions.
"Structurally, when people think of prevention, they think about it in a geographic paradigm," Wilson notes. "The United States means rich and, quite frankly, to the rest of the world, it means White. Africa means poor and it means crime. For African-Americans, we get left out completely."
Blacks are also partly at fault for not have a larger role at the conference, Wilson says.
"There are so few African-Americans who are in leadership roles around fighting HIV and AIDS that that limits our ability to impact HIV policy," he says. "The people who organize these meetings don't think about us when they organize them. The reason they don't think us is because we're not there."
Women of color ravaged by AIDS
Although African-American and Latino women represent less than a quarter of all women in the United States, together they make up 80 percent of AIDS cases among women in the United States, according to a report made public here on Wednesday.
The report, titled "Women and HIV/AIDS: Confronting the Crisis," draws on an array of federal and international statistics to track the spread of the virus.
"According to the US Centers for Disease Control, the proportion of AIDS cases among adults and adolescent women in the United States has more than tripled since 1985," the report says. "The epidemic has increased most dramatically among African American and Hispanic women. Together, they represent less than one fourth of all women in the US, yet they accounted for 80 percent of AIDS cases reported among women in 2000."
AIDS is the leading cause of death for African-Americans aged 25-34. Overall, while women have become a larger share of AIDS cases in recent years, there are considerable racial differences. Black women represented nearly a third (34 percent) of newly-reported AIDS cases in 2001, compared to 15 percent for White women.
Experts note than many African-American women do not engage in high-risk behavior, but contract HIV through unprotected sex with male partners that either inject drugs or have sex with other men.
Phill Wilson, executive director of the Black AIDS Institute, says he is not surprised by the figures.
"Because of the disease's presence in our community, there is a higher viral burden," he says, noting that approximately half of all new HIV infections in the U.S. are among African-Americans. "People don't like to talk about it but the family structure is less stable. Therefore, Black women are more likely to have more partners throughout their lifetime than White women and that's not a [negative] commentary on Black women."
Because of the disproportionate number of Black males that serve time in prison, that, too, is a contributing factor, Wilson says.
In what is being called the "feminization" of HIV/AIDS, scholars and academics are paying increasing attention to the role gender plays in the spread of HIV/AIDS.
"Globally there are now 17 million women and 18.7 million men between the ages of 15 and 49 living with HIV/AIDS," says the report issued by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). " Since 1985, the percentage of women among adults living with AIDS has risen from 35 percent to 48 percent."
In its 2004 report, on global AIDS, UNAIDS observed: "Nowhere is the epidemic's 'feminization' more apparent than in sub-Saharan Africa, where 57% of adults infected are women, and 75% of young people infected are women and girls. Several social factors are driving this trend.
damages tissues and increases the risk of HIV transmission, is widespread, particularly in the context of violent conflict."
The problem is so serious in some countries that up to 60 percent of today's 15-year-olds will not live to celebrate their 60th birthday.
"Strong leadership at all levels is required to address gender inequality as a central driver of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and to reverse the spread of the disease," the new jointly-issued report says. "Heads of State, government officials, policy makers and community and religious leaders must speak out strongly and urgently on the need to protect women and girls from violence and discrimination and to make gender and HIV/AIDS a highly visible priority."
In his address Sunday opening the 15th international conference on AIDS here, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Anan noted gender differences that contribute to the growth of HIV/AIDS.
"Why are women more vulnerable to infection?" he asked, rhetorically. "Why is that so even where they are not the ones with the most sexual partners outside marriages, nor more likely than men to be injecting drug users?"
Answering his own question, he continued: "Usually, because society's inequalities put them at risk - unjust, unconscionable risk. A range of factors conspires to make this so: poverty, abuse and violence, lack of information, coercion by older men, and men having several concurrent sexual relationships that entrap young women in a giant network of infection.
"These factors cannot be addressed piecemeal. What is needed is real, positive change that will give more power and confidence to women and girls. Change that will transform relations between women and men at all levels of society."
Rather than initiate institutional change, however, many policymakers have adopted simplistic approaches to addressing the AIDS pandemic.
"The ABC approach - Abstain, Be faithful, use Condoms - is not a sufficient means of prevention for women and adolescent girls," UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Obaid says in a statement. "Abstinence is meaningless to women who are coerced into sex. Faithfulness offers little protection to wives whose husbands have several partners or were infected before marriage. And condoms require the cooperation of men."
She adds, "The social and economic empowerment of women is key. The epidemic won't be reversed unless governments provide the resources needed to ensure women's right to sexual and reproductive health."
Recommendations included:
- Establishing programs that responds to women's needs in prevention, treatment, community-based care, education, violence and human rights;
- Undertaking gender analysis at every stage of policy design, implementation and evaluation to ensure that all forms of gender discrimination are eliminated and to protect and promote women's human rights;
- Ensuring that adolescent girls and women have the knowledge and means to prevent HIV infection;
- Empowering women economically by providing them with access to credit and business and leadership skills to break the cycle of poverty, gender inequality and vulnerability to HIV transmission and
- Promoting zero tolerance of all forms of violence against women and girls
The report concluded: "...Without leadership and political will, without the necessary funding, the situation for women and girls will continue to deteriorate and the hope of achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 - particularly reducing extreme poverty - will not be fulfilled. We can no longer look at women as victims; it is time to recognize and build on their strengths. Strategies to reverse the AIDS epidemic cannot succeed unless women and girls are empowered to claim their rights."
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