Salute: Alicia Keys Pushes For HIV Education In The U.S.

Singer has visited women who have HIV around the world

Alicia Keys is a hands-on type of celebrity philanthropist. She proved that (again) this week when she visited the United Medical Center’s HIV program in Washington, D.C. On Monday, the Grammy Award-winning singer met with women there to discuss their experiences with the virus, and the fear and stigma associated with the disease. Keys, who has also traveled to Africa and India to meet with women who have AIDS, is working with the Kaiser Family Foundation’s “Empowered” campaign. The effort, launched last month, aims to educate women about HIV and provide grants to community-based projects that will do the same. According to Kaiser, one in four of the 1.1 million people living with HIV in the U.S. are women. “Black women are disproportionately affected, making up for the majority of all new infections,” Keys said. “That’s a must-have conversation.” (Associated Press)

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Medical Landmark: Baby With H.I.V. Cured In Rural Mississippi

Baby was treated with antiretroviral drugs 30 hours after birth

This is huge! Doctors announced on Sunday that a baby, born in rural Mississippi, has been cured of an H.I.V. infection for the first time EVER. This development could change the way infected newborns are treated and dramatically reduce the number of children living with the virus that causes AIDS around the world. The baby was treated aggressively with antiretroviral drugs about 30 hours after birth, which is something that is not usually done. “For pediatrics, this is our Timothy Brown,” said Dr. Deborah Persaud (pictured), associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and lead author of the report on the cured baby. “It’s proof of principle that we can cure H.I.V. infection if we can replicate [Brown’s] case.” (Timothy Brown, known as the Berlin patient, is the first person to have been cured of the H.I.V. infection. Read more about him here.) Persaud and other researchers spoke about the findings ahead of their presentation at Monday’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta. (New York Times)

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Philadelphia To Install Condom Dispensers In High Schools

Officials hope to curb the spread of STDs.

While the rest of the country is debating whether or not guns belong in public schools, the City of Philadelphia is adopting another form of protection.

With the spread of STDs among high schoolers reaching epidemic levels, the school system is install free condom dispensers in 22 area schools. The schools with the most STD cases will be receiving the dispensers. They will not be placed in plain view in the hallways. Instead they will be located in the nurse's office.

"We believe distributing condoms is part of our obligation to keep students healthy and to remain healthy," school district spokesman Fernando Gallard told ABC News. "The health department has described this as a continued epidemic of STDs among teenagers in Philadelphia."

In the past five years, 5 percent of Philadelphia's teenagers have tested positive for STDs including HIV.

"The City of Brotherly Love" isn't the first to adopt such a strategy. A school in New York City provided its students condoms at the prom.

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What Is It That Young Black Gay Men Don’t Get About HIV?

High rate of new infections points to a disconnect between prevention messages and their targets

White men and women get it. Latinos and Latinas get it. Even black women, who bear a disproportionate share of HIV infections, get it.

But young black gay men, based on the spike in HIV infections among them, apparently do not get it.

What is "it"? The message that HIV transmission isn’t one of Aesop’s fables or something as intangible as Jim Crow-era segregation may seem today. The message that HIV is real. There is risk. And there’s no cure, despite much lauded advances in treatment that have made the disease manageable.

That’s a consciousness that AIDS activists and some political leaders worry is nearly absent from the minds of young black gay men, who make up more than half of all new HIV infections annually, according to the latest figures released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

When the CDC first sounded the alarm about young black gay men and their high risk for the disease half a decade ago, Tony Ray was in his late teens. Today, the 26-year-old New York City-based AIDS activist says not much has changed about the hyper-masculine, anti-gay communities in which he and his peers live.

“Stigma is the biggest factor” contributing to the high burden of new HIV infection rates among young black men, says Ray, who is co-chair of the Campaign to End AIDS in Youth Council and a community activist for Housing Works, an organization fighting homelessness among those infected.

“If you have a society that says you have to be out and open, but doesn’t allow you to come out and get the affection [you] deserve, you are more likely to live in shame,” Ray says.

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Shame fosters a host of unhealthy behaviors among black men, Ray adds. He’s known his peers to seek discreet sexual encounters with men on “hook up” websites and, out of desperation, compromise their safety to attract other men who don’t “play safe” and are more likely to be HIV positive. And even among openly gay young black men, Ray says, conversations about condom use and HIV status don’t take place at the moment they should.

The emphasis on hyper-masculinity in the black community doesn’t help either. Young men understand very early on the status that comes with dominating and bedding women, even if they are having sex with other men, Ray says.

The spike in new HIV infections among this group seems to be a byproduct of shame, stigma and lack of effective sexual health education, most activists and sexual health experts agree.

The CDC estimates that 1.1 million people in the U.S. are HIV positive, with 50,000 newly infected each year and 1 in 4 occurring in people ages 13 through 24. In 2010, 1,000 young people were infected each month. Young black men who have sex with men (MSM) saw a 48 percent jump in new HIV infections from 2006 to 2009, according to CDC data.

With millions of dollars in government funding already going toward helping community groups test, prevent and educate high-risk demographics, some sexual health experts are beyond frustrated by the latest youth HIV statistics.

To Be Young, HIV+ and Black

As Dec. 1 marks World AIDS Day, examining how we can fight the epidemic claiming our youth.

After then 19-year-old LaQwanna Finkley complained about a headache for the umpteenth time, her mother sent her to the clinic. It was a visit that would change everything.

“The doctor gave me a full physical and blood work, and she asked if I wanted to take an HIV test,” the Bronx, New York, native says. “I said, ‘Sure, no problem.’ A week later, she told me that everything came back negative, except for my HIV test.”

Finkley’s response to the news doesn’t at all surprise those who know the upbeat, pragmatic young woman: “Okay. What do I have to do next?”

Finkley, born legally blind and often bullied as a child, viewed the diagnosis as just another challenge to overcome. “I knew that this was a task that God had for me; that He needed me to do something for Him. Even if I am scared, I’m still gonna use this situation to glorify God,” she explains.

She believes she contracted the disease from unprotected sex with a philandering ex-boyfriend, but her diagnosis hasn’t stopped her from living her life. Five years later, the relatively healthy 24-year-old is in a loving relationship with the man she was dating when she found out her status (he’s HIV-negative and gets tested every six months). Finkley spends her days working with at-risk teens in New York City’s Young Adult Internship Program, where her straight-talking tendencies are put to great use educating a rotating class of teens to the realities of the disease. “I tell them that some people don’t get a second chance; my second chance is for you not to become positive,” she says.

To say it’s necessary work is an understatement; young black men and women are contracting HIV at an unprecedented rate. According to the Centers for Disease, Control and Prevention, 26 percent of all new HIV infections occur in youth ages 13 to 24. But while blacks ages 13 to 19 make up just 15 percent of the teen population, they represent 60 percent of new teenage HIV infections. And because the risk of contracting the disease is increased in communities where a higher percentage of people already have it, black teens are more likely to join the ranks of the infected.

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Why are the numbers so heartbreakingly high? Poverty, for one. A 2010 CDC study found that “poverty is the single most important demographic factor associated with HIV infection among inner-city heterosexuals.” Nationwide, 35 percent of African Americans are living at or below the poverty threshold, which the Census Bureau defines as $22,811 for a family of four. Accordingly, the president’s National HIV/AIDS Strategy focuses resources in socioeconomically depressed areas.