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For every 10,000 people living in Washington, DC, nearly 3,000 of those have HIV or AIDS. According to Washington, DC's director of the HIV/AIDS Administration, that's nearly 15,000 people, which works out to be a higher rate for people with the disease than West Africa. This amount is greater than the one percent limit for an epidemic, according to a 2008 epidemiology report, and is more like the rate found in places like Uganda or Kenya.
Shannon Hader, the District's HIV/AIDS director, says that the disease is being spread in every conceivable way, from male homosexual activity to drugs that use needles to be injected, and that the true number of people living with the disease is a lot higher than originally projected.
The Washington Post report that almost four percent of blacks in the District have the autoimmune deficiency disease, as well as almost two percent of Latinos and 1.4 percent of all Caucasians. A whopping seventy-six percent of people infected with the disease are African-American, seventy percent are men and another seventy percent are over age 40.
Despite the rise of the AIDS/HIV disease in the District, more people are being diagnosed early, while they're still healthy and able to fight. |
