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Black Health Matters > Vitality > Red Ribbon Corner

Category: Red Ribbon Corner

Alicia Keys Shines Light on Women and HIV

Apr. 16 HIV / AIDS, News, Our Health, Red Ribbon Corner no comments

alicia keys empowered campaignOne in 32 African American women in the United States is likely to be diagnosed with HIV in her lifetime.

“One in 32, think about that,” said singer-songwriter Alicia Keys, citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistic at an event Monday. “Thirty years after we first heard of AIDS, it is really a tragedy that anybody is being infected.”

But people are being infected with the virus in the U.S. and, as Keys said, black women are affected disproportionately. Keys stammered a little as she read the word “disproportionately” from her notes, and then recovered and repeated it with force saying, “It’s a big word and it’s a bad thing. That’s not acceptable.”

Keys’ comments came at the kickoff of the EMPOWERED campaign, an effort to increase awareness of HIV and AIDS among women, a new part of the Greater Than AIDS public information push by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent part of the foundation.)

The CDC statistics on women in general and black women in particular are sobering.

  • There are more than 1.1 million people living with HIV in the U.S., and one-in-four of them are women.
  • The rate of infection for black women was 20 times higher in 2010 than it was for white women (38.1 per 100,000, compared to 1.9 per 100,000).
  • In 2010, 60 percent of women with HIV were African American, 19 percent were Latino, and 18 percent were white, according to the CDC.
  • Newly infected black and Latina women are more likely to be younger, with 23 percent of black women and 21 percent of Latina women in the 13-24 year old age range.
  • In 2009, black women accounted for the greatest share of deaths among women with HIV at 65 percent, followed by white women at 17 percent and Latinas at 14 percent.

One of the main themes of the campaign–which includes videos, public service ads, and social media efforts—is to make the issue personal for women. A video shows Keys interviewing five women living with HIV. “They are just like you and just like me,” Keys says in the video of the women, who all sat in the front row of the foundation’s conference center during Monday’s kickoff.

Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to President Barack Obama, and chairwoman of the White House Council on Women & Girls, also spoke at the event, making the point that the issue of women and AIDS has long been a personal one for her.

“Every day I carry around the heartbreak of losing my sister-in-law, who died nearly 20 years ago,” Jarrett said. “She went months without being diagnosed because nobody thought to test a married woman at the time.”

Jarrett pointed out that, under the Affordable Care Act, HIV testing is now covered as a preventive service without cost sharing, and beginning in 2014, people with HIV cannot be denied insurance because of a pre-existing condition.

—Diane Webber

This story originally appeared on Kaiser Health News. Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Older Adults and HIV Testing

Feb. 07 HIV / AIDS, Our Health, Red Ribbon Corner, Vitality no comments

aids awarenessToday’s sobering statistic: One out of every four people living with HIV/AIDS is 50 or older. What’s worse is that many of them are unaware they have HIV because they haven’t been tested, putting themselves and others at greater risk.

Not knowing their status puts these older adults at increased risk of late diagnosis. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 43 percent of HIV-positive people between the ages of 50 and 55, and 51 percent of those 65 or older, develop full-blown AIDS within a year of their diagnosis. They account for 35 percent of all AIDS-related deaths.

 

What’s Standing in the Way of HIV Testing

Though several barriers may prevent this population from getting tested, a new study out of UCLA found the chief reasons are a mistrust of the government and conspiracy theories about AIDS.

“Our work suggests that general mistrust of the government may adversely impact peoples’ willingness to get tested for HIV/AIDS,” said Chandra Ford, an assistant professor of community health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and the study’s primary investigator, in a statement. “HIV/AIDS is increasing among people 50 and older, but there’s not a lot of attention being paid to the HIV-prevention needs of these folks. Older adults are more likely to be diagnosed only after they’ve been sick, and as a result, they have worse prognoses than younger HIV-positive people do.”

 

Analyzing the Barriers to HIV Testing

The study, which looked at a small group of people recruited from public health venues, found that 72 percent of the participants did not trust government, and they believe the government is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves. Another 30 percent believe in AIDS-related conspiracy theories, including that the virus is man-made and was created to kill certain groups of people. Forty-five percent of the study’s participants had not had an HIV test in the previous 12 months.

“The CDC recommends that anyone who’s in a high-risk category should be tested every single year,” Ford said in her statement. “These findings mean that the CDC recommendations are not being followed.”

 

Next Steps for Older Adults and HIV Testing

Researchers say they need to examine other groups of older adults to determine if these views are more widely held than just among the at-risk population in this study.

New HIV Infection Rate Drops Among African-American Women

Dec. 20 HIV / AIDS, Our Health, Red Ribbon Corner, Vitality, Women no comments

For the first time, the rate of new HIV infections among African-American women declined 21 percent between 2008 and 2010, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report released Wednesday. “We are encouraged to see some declines among African-American women,” says Joseph Prejean, chief of the Behavioral and Clinical Surveillance Branch in the CDC’s division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. “They’ve been one of the most severely affected populations. We’re cautiously optimistic that this could be part of a longer-term trend.”

Other experts are similarly hopeful. “There is much to be encouraged about in these new findings, particularly in terms of overall stability of new HIV infections and a decrease in HIV infections among African-American women,” says Jeffrey Parsons, Ph.D., professor in the psychology department at Hunter College in New York City and director of the college’s Center for HIV/AIDS Educational Studies and Training. This drop in new infections, he says, “is likely due to very targeted behavioral intervention programs for African-American women.”

While this good news is a step in the right direction, black women still account for nearly two-thirds of new infections among American women, according to the CDC report.

Other minorities also are disproportionately affected. Blacks represent just 14 percent of the population, yet they account for 44 percent of new HIV infections. Hispanics are 16 percent of the population, but account for 21 percent of new infections.

The overall number of new infections among Americans has remained stable at about 50,000 per year over the last decade. The CDC says this indicates that prevention programs, testing and treatment are having an impact, but rates of new HIV infections are still too high.

Related Articles:

Many HIV-Positive Youth Don’t Know Their Status

Born Positive: ‘AIDS Babies’ Grow Up

Many HIV-Positive Youth Don’t Know Their Status

Nov. 27 Babies/Children/Teens, HIV / AIDS, Our Health, Red Ribbon Corner, Vitality no comments

The numbers are disturbing: A new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Vital Signs report found young Americans ages 13 to 24 make up more than a quarter (that’s 1 in 4 for those doing the math) of new HIV infections each year. Every month, 1,000 youth are becoming infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. A whopping 60 percent don’t know they are infected. The majority, 83 percent, of these new infections is among males, with African Americans and gay and bisexual men being hardest hit. The cost of care for the young and newly infected is approximately $400,000 over a lifetime.

“Despite the great treatment we have, HIV remains an incurable infection,” says Thomas R. Frieden, M.D., director of the CDC. “Given everything we know about HIV and everything we know about how to prevent it, it’s unacceptable that young people are getting infected from an entirely preventable disease.”

What’s leading to this epidemic within the epidemic? A toxic brew of stigma, homophobia, lack of access to health care, risky behaviors and too few young people being tested for HIV—and therefore not knowing their status, the experts say.

“Young men who have sex with men were more likely to have four or more sexual partners,” explains Kevin Fenton, M.D., director, National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and Tuberculosis Prevention. “High rates of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases in many African-American and gay communities increase the risk of being infected with every sexual encounter. HIV-infected people younger than 25 are significantly less likely to get and stay in care.”

Seventy-five percent of young people in the study say they weren’t taught about HIV or AIDS in school.

“If we’re going to see a generation free from AIDS, we’re going to have to intensify education,” Dr. Frieden says. That means “expanding access to testing, both in the health-care setting and in the community. It requires all of us to do our part. Young people need to get educated and get tested. Parents need to talk to their kids early and often about sexual health and staying safe. Health-care providers should test people 13 and older and provide tailored prevention.”

And, he says, all Americans need to talk about this issue.

The CDC’s plan to combat this news is multi-pronged:

  1. Improving the treatment cascade is critical. This would lead to fewer people out there who have uncontrolled infection and more HIV-positive people in care with their viral load suppressed.
  2. Educate the at-risk population to reduce risky behaviors, including multiple partners, illicit drug use, alcohol abuse and eschewing condoms.
  3. Making sure everyone knows his or her status. This means getting tested for HIV is key. Currently, just 13 percent of high school students have been tested. For 18- to 24-year-olds, the testing statistic increases, but only to 35 percent.

“We have to focus on where the epidemic is and hit harder there. If we can knock risky behavior down by even 10 or 20 percent,” Dr. Frieden says, we’ll be on our way to an AIDS-free generation.

Born Positive: ‘AIDS Babies’ Grow Up

Nov. 15 HIV / AIDS, Our Health, Red Ribbon Corner, Vitality no comments

Hydeia Broadbent doesn’t remember a time when HIV wasn’t part of her life. Since age 6 the global AIDS activist balanced national speaking engagements and television appearances with bouts of sickness and doctor’s appointments.

Shantrell Jackson, who was born with HIV, remembers taking medication regularly as early as the first grade. Her pills were put into applesauce to make ingestion tolerable.

Lolisa Gibson’s mother transmitted HIV to her at birth. But decades later Gibson broke the cycle and delivered a healthy baby boy who doesn’t have the virus.

These women, all born with the virus that causes AIDS, were the babies born in the 1980s who were doomed to perish. But they beat the odds. They defied death predictions. They survived and now they thrive.

Broadbent, Jackson and Gibson inherited HIV, but they all made a choice to work to battle the disease and the stigma around it.

Thirty years into the AIDS epidemic medical advancements have prolonged the lives of babies born with HIV and reduced the rate of mother-to-child transmission. The fact that these women and girls are here is amazing, says Kimberly Bates, M.D., medical director of the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Family AIDS Clinic and Educational Services in Columbus, Ohio. “This is the cure for polio in my time,” Dr. Bates says. “Something that killed so many children 30 years ago is preventable. We can prevent mom from transmitting HIV to her child. Thirty years ago that was a dream.”

Since the early 1990s mother-to-child HIV transmission has declined by 90 percent, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In 1991 there were about 1,700 cases annually of perinatal transmissions in the United States. Now that number is around 300. A woman with HIV has a 25 percent chance of transmitting the virus to her child. But with proper antiretroviral therapy treatment available now, that drops to 1 to 2 percent chance, the CDC says.

Progress in perinatal transmission and HIV care has meant saving lives, Broadbent says. “It was my childhood growing up in the hospital,” says Broadbent, 28. “It was normal for me always being sick, seeing my friends pass away.”

Life-prolonging medication also helps women born with HIV have quality of life and do the same thing their peers do, such as pursue careers, further their education and start families, Dr. Bates says. “They’ve had to do that all in the face of doing something that probably the majority of Americans couldn’t do, be almost perfect in taking care of their health,” she says. “Most Americans can’t remember to take a multivitamin every day.”

But living an entire life with HIV can sometimes overwhelm young women, says Dazon Dixon Diallo, founder of SisterLove, a women’s AIDS and reproductive health advocacy organization in Atlanta. “Adults infected later in life have memories of a life without AIDS,” Diallo says. “These women don’t.”

And the transition from childhood to womanhood can sometimes mean a transition out of consistent medical care. “They come through a system that nurtures kids,” she says. “Transitioning from that full care to self-care is a big transition, and we lose a lot of young people to that. They fall out of care. That could lead to losing their lives. If they’ve lost care it’s an opportunity for them to get sicker faster because they’re not in treatment.”

Shantrell Jackson, 27, of Dunwoody, Georgia, was always sick throughout childhood. But she says she didn’t learn she had HIV until she was 18. Jackson says she didn’t seek medical care for about a year to avoid the routine associated with the disease. “I kept saying I have an STD, but I’ve never had sex,” says Jackson, a former HIV camp counselor. “When I’m depressed I don’t want to take my meds. The meds are a constant reminder that you’re living with something you can’t control.”

Now she has more control over her emotions. Jackson, who has been working at SisterLove for three years, said she’s seen a therapist. And she keeps herself from slipping back into depression by going to church, meditating and attending support groups.

Broadbent says HIV may manifest itself physically, but the virus also has an impact on the mental health of those who’ve lived with it all of their lives, especially when they start dating.“It affects your mind, body and soul. If you are not secure with who you are it can be very depressing,” says Broadbent, who lives in Las Vegas. “You can think you can’t find love…. You wonder why me.”

Women born with HIV experience mental anguish because there is still stigma associated with the disease. The stigma surrounding sexual transmission of HIV is especially strong, Jackson says, but when people learn she came into the world with the virus, “they go from looking down on you to empathizing,” she says.

Jackson has developed and facilitated workshops for people her age to help them work through issues dealing with dating and disclosure.

Lolisa Gibson, 26, spent years working as an AIDS activist and educator disclosing her status to people across the country. But when she discovered she was pregnant she became concerned about disclosure. “I looked at my fiancé and I said how do I tell my baby I have HIV,” she says. “He said, ‘You tell him just like you tell everyone else.’”

Gibson’s son is now a healthy 3-year-old. She took antiretroviral drugs throughout her pregnancy to prevent transmitting the virus to her son. He also took medication soon after birth and was tested monthly.

Gibson says she learned she had HIV at age 16 after she became ill and her weight dropped to 95 pounds. She learned she had esophagitis and later tested positive for HIV. Tests indicated she had the virus for at least 10 years.

Resentment toward their mothers for transmitting the HIV virus to them still looms for some women who live with it. But Gibson says she focuses on maintaining a loving relationship with her mother now and not on actions of the past. “I can’t image the pressure of knowing you gave your child something they can’t get rid of,” says Gibson who lives in Brooklyn, New York. “My mom has shown me nothing but love and support.”

Gibson says her diagnosis led her to commit her life to working as an HIV advocate and educator. “When I learned I was positive, I didn’t have anyone to talk to,” she says. “They (counselors) were older white people who didn’t know what I was going through. I felt empty. I didn’t want another person to go through that.”

Broadbent also sees her diagnosis as a call to action. “I think this happened to me for a reason,” she says. “All of my struggles and everything I go through. I feel like I should be here telling my story and making people care about their life and their actions.”

—Sherri Williams