Study: Safe Sex Message Not Spreading
C H I C A G O, Feb. 6, 2001 -- A stunning one-third of young gay black men inlarge U.S. cities are infected with HIV, another sign of thegrowing racial divide in the AIDS epidemic.
The findings, based on a study released Monday, show that HIVinfections are disturbingly common among gay men of all races intheir 20s, especially considering that they grew up knowing howAIDS spreads.
However, HIV is particularly rampant among young gay blacks, andexperts worry that these men have missed the safe-sex message thathas been a drumbeat among white homosexual men since the mid-1980s.
The study found that among young gay men, 3 percent of Asians, 7percent of whites, 15 percent of Hispanics and 30 percent of blacksare infected with the virus.
"That 30 percent is an amazing statistic," said Dr. HeleneGayle, AIDS chief at the Centers for Disease Control andPrevention. "When people think 'gay,' they think 'white.' But thepeople still at greatest risk are sexually active gay men, and thatcuts across all races and ethnicities."
The study, directed by the CDC's Linda Valleroy, was presentedat the Eighth Annual Retrovirus Conference in Chicago. Since thiswas the first survey ever done among gays of this age group — 23 to29 — there are no previous numbers with which to compare thesefindings.
The Shifting Burden of HIV
Since the epidemic's start, when AIDS was primarily a disease ofgay white men, the burden of HIV has increasingly shifted toblacks. Now, just over half of the estimated 40,000 new HIVinfections annually occur among blacks. Among infected women,blacks outnumber whites almost 4 to 1.
Many worry that homosexual men have grown complacent aboutcatching HIV because effective treatments can hold the disease incheck. Some of these gay men may be more likely to have risky sex,such as anal intercourse without condoms.
The new study does not reveal whether dangerous sex practicesare growing among the young, but it does show that such habits arecommon. Almost half of the men surveyed admitted they had hadunprotected anal sex during the previous six months.
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