The Good AIDS News
November 30, 2007
The good news is that UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, says there’s less AIDS in the world than they thought: 33 million infected worldwide compared to last year’s 40 million. The bad news is that critics were right to say that one can’t just extrapolate wildly high numbers on the basis of surveys of sexually active women and drug users. Now they’re surveying actual households, and they’re not finding those kinds of numbers.
The United Nations figures there are 440,000 new and 4.9 million total HIV infections in Asia. Beijing officials announced 973 new HIV/AIDS cases in the city so far this year, up 50 percent from 2006. That’s more than double San
Francisco’s 439 cases last year.
Despite early projections that AIDS would hit Asia even harder than the West, rates in China and most of Asia are still relatively low. China has only one-eighth and Japan one-thirtieth the rate of the United States.
The 2005 figures from the Centers for Disease Control show Asians make up just 1.1 percent of the United States’ AIDS cases; whites comprise 31 percent. San Francisco’s latest health reports peg whites with the highest prevalence rate of AIDS with 5,806 per 100,000. African American and Latinos are lower, but the Asian American rate of 402 per 100,000 is a staggering 14 times less than whites.
Activists maintain the Asian population is too small for statistics to be significant. However, Asians are one-third of San Francisco and a majority in Hawai‘i, and reports from every state and city I have seen show Asians with the lowest AIDS rates. If Asians won’t admit to having sex with other men, why is it that 90 percent of Asian cases in San Francisco were transmitted by sex with gay or bisexual men, or injection drug use?
It seems health outcomes are only reported when they can be blamed on racism or injustice, which is why Asians statistics are omitted when they have lower rates of almost every other kind of cancer or disease.
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