Drive To End AIDS In U.S. Stalls As Epidemic Grips Minorities

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-23/drive-to-end-aids-in-u-s-stalls-as-epidemic-grips-minorities.html

Monique Moree is the new face of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. The 31-year-old stay-at-home mom, who is black, was pregnant with her third child in 2005 when she found out she had HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

“I was shocked,” Moree, of Summerville, South Carolina, said by telephone. “Being a wife, I didn’t think I could be HIV positive. I hated myself and God. I wanted to kill myself.”

Now Moree takes three pills a day to fight the illness and, so far, has been free of its most damaging effects. While she’s thrived, others she knows haven’t been so fortunate, she said. She blames the government for not doing enough for minority communities increasingly at the center of the U.S. epidemic.

“African Americans have been hit so hard,” she said.

While black men and women are 14 percent of the population, they accounted for 44 percent of 48,000 new HIV cases in 2009, the latest year for which definitive data is available, according to the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The infection rate in black men was more than six times that in white males, and black women were 15 times more likely to become infected than their white counterparts, the CDC data shows.