HIV Toll Heavier on US Blacks; New Cases on Rise in Disadvantaged

The number of new HIV/AIDS cases in the United States appears to have stabilized during the last three years, but US researchers said yesterday that the impact is growing among disadvantaged populations, notably African-Americans. African-American women and men account for 75 percent of cases involving heterosexual transmission, "a hugely disproportionate total," said Ronald O. Valdisseri, a senior AIDS official at the CDC. In all, heterosexual cases rose 10 percent over the past three years to a little more than a quarter of all cases.

African-American men compose 40 percent of the infections among gay and bisexual men, according to figures from 25 states analyzed by the CDC. And in a separate study of high-risk populations in six major US cities, 91 percent of HIV-infected African-Americans who are gay or bisexual did not know their status, compared with 60 percent among HIV-infected white males. Seventy percent of infected Hispanics also did not know. "That's a stunning number," Valdisseri said, adding that the problem was compounded with the finding that over half of them had not been using condoms.

The data were released at the start of the 14th International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Spain. Peter Piot, director of the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS, who sat on a panel with Valdisseri, said that the new trends in the US epidemic seemed to have similarities with patterns of the disease in Africa. A handful of US researchers have found echoes of Africa's epidemic in poor and disenfranchised minority communities in the United States. Valdisseri, in an interview, resisted the African parallel, saying that the 25-state and six-city studies were not conclusive. But he said the increase in heterosexual transmission -- Africa's epidemic is almost completely passed through heterosexual relations -- and the disproportionate impact on African-Americans "is certainly a concern."

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