The AIDS epidemic is spreading ever more widely through the U.S. Latino population, especially among women and adolescents.
Most alarming to community leaders, who yesterday celebrated the second National Latino AIDS Awareness Day, is that many Hispanics who are HIV-positive do not know it, and are tested only when it is too late.
U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona, yesterday in a conference call announced a new radio and TV campaign encouraging Latinos to be tested for HIV, because approximately 45 percent of the Latino population has never been tested for AIDS.
Nationally, New York State is at the top of the list of those infected, with an estimated total of 18,651 Latinos living with AIDS.
“We are confronting the stigma associated with HIV, which keeps the illness hidden as a negative secret in the Latino family. Infections may be falling among the white population, but Latinos and African Americans are facing a new and horrifying reality,” said Dennis de León, President of the Latino Commission on AIDS.
HIV infections among Hispanics rose by 26 percent last year, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, which indicate that the epidemic continues as one of the principal causes of death among Latinos 25 to 44 years old.
At present, Latinos are the largest minority group in the country, 14 percent of the U.S. population, but they make up 18 percent of the 816,149 cases reported since the beginning of the epidemic in the 1980s. By the same token, Latinos represent 19 percent of the 43,158 cases reported in 2001.
Health authorities estimate that some 50,000 people are carriers of the HIV virus in the State of New York, though the exact number is not known, because the state began compiling such data only two years ago.
For each person with AIDS, there are four to six who carry the virus without being aware of it, according to Guillermo Chacón, executive director of the Latino Commission on AIDS. The group, which instigated the national health campaign, “Open your eyes: HIV knows no borders,” succeeded in getting another 250 cities in some 45 states to join the cause.
The number of Latinas with AIDS has risen nationally, from 15 percent in 1990 to 23 percent in 2002 of all cases of Latinos with AIDS; the infection rate among Latinas is five times higher than among white women. Among adolescents 13- to 19-years old, AIDS cases in 2002 stood at 22 percent of all Latinos with AIDS.
To find information in Spanish about where to go to be tested for HIV, please call: (800) 344-7432.
The numbers don’t lie
Cases of AIDS among Latinos from 1981 to 2000:
* 163,940, of whom 87,888 have already died.
* Men: 132,051
* Women: 31,889
Sources of transmission among Latinos:
* 42 percent of men with AIDS contracted it from having sex with other men; 34 percent contracted it by using needles infected with HIV.
* 38 percent of women with AIDS contracted it by using needles infected with HIV; 47 percent contracted AIDS from having sex with men carrying the HIV virus.
