D.C. HIV Rate: 3 Percent
It only takes a one percent infection rate for a disease to be considered a “generalized and severe” epidemic. Washington, D.C.’s HIV/AIDS rate is now three times as severe as “severe”: The Washington Post reported yesterday that “at least 3 percent of District residents have HIV or AIDS.”
The District’s HIV/AIDS Administration estimates the number of known infected D.C. residents at 15,120, a figure which brings D.C. to a rate “higher than West Africa.” HIV/AIDS cases have increased 22 percent in the District since numbers were last released in 2006.
The true number of infected residents is probably substantially higher than that. The numbers only reflect those residents who have been tested for HIV, and the study reports that only three out of five people in D.C. are aware of their HIV status.
Increased testing may be partly responsible for the heightened numbers. Reports the Post: “More people are getting HIV diagnoses early, while they are still healthy, as a result of a policy of routine testing implemented by the city in mid-2006.” Since then, “Publicly supported HIV testing expanded by 70 percent.”
I’ll have more on the numbers when the D.C. Department of Health releases its reports today.
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10:06 am
“Good morning, everyone in DC has AIDS!”. That’s one startling Monday morning news bit.
1:23 pm
I’ll admit that I’m not really knowledgeable here, but my South-African-public-health-degreed-HIV/AIDS-educator sister says that the HIV/AIDS rate in West Africa is actually pretty low, and it’s a different type (type 2 versus type 1) than in the United States, and the comparison isn’t really useful. All that’s not to say that the numbers in DC aren’t really, really scary, but I worry about how people use the specter of AFRICA to drive the point home…
1:46 pm
Good points, Rex—Africa’s AIDS rate is often pointed to to figure out How Fucked Your U.S. City Is, and that’s pretty fucked up, I’ll admit. And you’re right that West Africa has a low AIDS rate compared to sub-Saharan Africa. I agree that the numbers in D.C. are really, really scary, but the numbers in West Africa are really, really scary too, even knowing that the numbers in sub-Saharan Africa are really, REALLY REALLY scary. But I totally agree that coverage should focus on “AIDS is really really scary” instead of “Africa is scary, and it’s scary when we’re like Africa.”
3:17 pm
Yeah, yeah, thanks. I didn’t mean to minimize the problems anywhere. It’s tough to look at these things without being tempted to rank them, and it’s especially tough when friggin’ imperialism gets involved.
3:24 pm
When you think about it, a lot of these statistics depend on how cases are discovered & reported, so comparing AIDS rates on two different continents really doesn’t make a lot of sense. And the differences between strains of HIV throws the whole thing for a loop. But invoking Africa makes headlines!