Blacks Continue To Lose Ground as Talk of Turning the AIDS Tide Wages

Blacks Continue To Lose Ground as Talk of Turning the AIDS Tide Wages: At a time when the promising practices and the potential of new drugs to arrest the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the U.S. are greater than at any other time in the past three decades, recent data released at the International AIDS Conference, July 22-27, show that the most vulnerable people at the epicenter of the disease—African-Americans, especially gay men—are steadily losing ground and their lives in the war against AIDS.

The AIDS crisis among Black men who have sex with men, or MSM, is far from over and not even close to being under control, according to a new report released this week by the Los Angeles-based think tank The Black AIDS Institute. Black MSM account for 1 in 500 Americans, but represent nearly 1 in 4 new HIV infections, according to the report “Back of the Line: The State of AIDS Among Black Gay Men in America.”

“Black men who have sex with men are engulfed in a raging generalized epidemic,” said Phil Wilson, president of the Institute and an openly gay Black man who has been living with HIV for 32 years. In fact, the report found that the odds of a Black man who has sex with men becoming infected increase from a 1-in-4 chance of infection at 25 years old to a 59.3 percent chance by the time he reaches 400 years old.