On the Road to Queendom: World AIDS Day

Queens, December 1st is World AIDS Day...

World AIDS Day is held on 1 December every year. It is an international day to raise awareness about HIV and AIDS around the world. The first World AIDS Day was celebrated on 1 December 1988. This year’s theme for the day is “human rights and access to treatment”. The theme has been chosen to address the critical need to protect human rights and make HIV prevention, treatment, care and support accessible to all. The theme acts as a call to countries to remove laws that discriminate against people living with HIV.

The news on Black AIDS in America for 2009 is as follows per the Black AIDS Institute at BlackAIDS.org:

The U.S. epidemic is at least 40 percent larger than previously believed and growing by between 55,000 and 58,000 infections a year;
The U.S. has never logged fewer than 50,000 new infections a year, contrary to prior belief that we leveled out at 40,000 new infections a year in the mid-1990s;
Black Americans represented 45 percent of people newly infected in 2006, despite being just 13 percent of the population;
Men who have sex with men accounted for 53 percent of all new infections in 2006, and young Black men were particularly hard hit;
In 2006, Black gay and bisexual men between the ages of 13 and 29 accounted for more new HIV infections among gay and bisexual men than any other race or age group.
And more than half, or 52 percent, of all Black gay and bi men infected that year were under 30 years old.
For black women living with HIV/AIDS, the most common methods of transmission were high-risk heterosexual contact and injection drug use.