Almost a fifth of transgender women worldwide are infected with HIV, results of a meta-analysis published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases shows. A total of 39 studies involving over 11,000 transgender women in 15 different countries were included in the study, which…
I'm From Driftwood
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In my research today i’ve learned that a lot of organizations who do any kind of HIV/AIDS education tend to promote and idea called the “ABC’s of HIV”, and then usually involve Abstinence, Being Monogamous and Condom use. Which is all well and good for people who want to be abstinent, or monogamous. Realistically, something like this completely erases a whole range of sexual identities not limited to the queer community and generally promotes slut-shaming ideals as in “If you have sex you will get AIDS” or “All sexually active people will get an STI” or “If you’re sexually active you’re probably going to have an STI if you don’t have one already”. I think we can all pretty much agree this is bullshit, so I’m proposing this revision to the “ABC’s of HIV”.
(via celestethebest)
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Possible Path to Vaccine for AIDS Is Suggested “In what may be an important step toward a long-elusive AIDS vaccine, American researchers have minutely tracked one person’s powerful immune response to the virus to see how a series of mutations led to an antibody that can defeat many H.I.V. strains.
A vaccine still remains far off, but the research lighted up one complex path that may someday be followed to that distant goal.
Thirty-four million people in the world are H.I.V.-positive, and 2.5 million are newly infected each year, 50,000 of them in this country…”
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Knowing a MtF Trans* Woman: Meta-analysis shows the massive global burden of HIV among transgender women -
Fighting HIV stigma in the Honduran Garifuna community.
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HIV Infection Is Most Concentrated In The South, Where Students Don’t Learn About It In School
The CDC’s most recent HIV Surveillance Report contains the first-ever comprehensive data set allowing researchers to map HIV infections across the entire country. As the agency explains, their new data paints a “complete picture of diagnosed HIV infection in the U.S.,” revealing potential trends in infections across different regions. At least one clear trend emerges among Southern states, where the concentration of HIV infections tend to be higher.
It’s likely no coincidence that many of those same states lack the comprehensive sexual education requirements that would help educate their residents about HIV transmission from an early age. Health classes in Texas, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana aren’t required to provide any kind of medically accurate information about HIV. And in two of those states — Texas and Florida — public schools don’t have to offer any type of sexual health education whatsoever.
In fact, just 20 states across the country mandate both sex education and HIV education, while the rest of country’s youth are growing up with significant gaps in their knowledge about sexual health. That’s especially troubling amid reports that, even though new cases of HIV in the U.S. are beginning to stabilize, young people still continue to put themselves at risk for the virus.
The HIV epidemic continues to take a disproportionate toll on men who have sex with men (MSM) — 62 percent of all HIV diagnoses are attributed to male-to-male sexual behavior, even though MSM represent just two percent of the U.S. population — yet the nation’s sexual health requirements also lag behind when it comes to sexual orientation. None of the southern states with the highest rates of HIV infection require public schools to provide LGBT-inclusive information in their health classes — and Alabama, South Carolina, and Texas actually stipulate that teachers must impart negative, shame-based information about homosexuality.
(via fyqueerlatinxs)
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The Plague Years, in Film and Memory
” ‘Remember when they burnt those people’s house down?’ Spencer Cox asks.
We are at a reunion dinner for about half a dozen people at a restaurant on the edge of Soho. I haven’t seen him since the mid-1990s. He looks unwell. It’s late September, 2012. On Nov. 30 we’re on a panel together for World AIDS Day at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center. By Dec. 18 he is dead.
I don’t remember, so I look it up when I get back to D.C. In 1987, in Arcadia, Florida, Clifford and Louise Ray’s house mysteriously burned to the ground after a court ordered the local schools had to admit their HIV-positive hemopheliac sons, despite community objections. Other families had already been pulling their kids out of the school, which also faced multiple phoned-in bomb threats. The family decided their only option was to give up and leave town…”
read more at The Atlantic
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I finally got around watching this documentary.
I have learned that the reason I can live with HIV/AIDS now is due to the sacrifices of the HIV/AIDS activists.
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Mass Incarceration, Homelessness and HIV Vulnerability By Paul Kawata
“Among its many positive characteristics, the United States holds two unfortunate and reciprocal distinctions. America has the largest incarcerated population of any other nation in the world and has the highest rate of AIDS diagnosis (second highest rate of HIV infection) of any other industrialized nation. While the annual rate of new HIV infections in the United States has remained stubbornly high — approximately 50,000 per year — the number of adults under federal, state or local supervision has more than quadrupled since 1980 from 1.8 million to 7.1 million in 2010. Despite comprising only 5 percent of the global population, the U.S. accounts for 25 percent of all the world’s incarcerations.
To mark National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, the National Minority AIDS Council has released a new report with Housing Works titled “Mass Incarceration, Housing Instability and HIV/AIDS.” Over the last three decades the epidemics of mass incarceration and HIV/AIDS have become increasingly concentrated among economically disadvantaged people of color, especially African Americans. African Americans make up only 13 percent of America’s population, but account for 44 percent of new HIV infections and almost half of all AIDS diagnoses, with Black gay men facing the heaviest HIV burden of any population in the country. At the same time, despite similar rates of criminal conduct, African American males are more than six times as likely to be incarcerated as their White counterparts.
These disturbing trends are inextricably linked, with mass incarceration playing a major role in driving the domestic HIV/AIDS epidemic.”
(via fyqueerlatinxs)
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The Needle Prick Project: Jeffrey Tomlinson's Ultimate HIV Lesson -
I'm From Philadelphia, PA by Howard Nields
I guess I must first preface this tale with a revelation. I am a gay man living with HIV. I have been this way since October 23, 2007. I don’t blame anyone but myself for my “situation”. I mean let’s be realistic, it takes two to tango. I wasn’t raped or drugged or whatever. I willingly engaged in stupid, risky unprotected sex and now I must deal with the penultimate consequence. But I digress…
I was told something the other day that was rather hurtful and I suppose untrue, yet there are many times I wonder if that is so. A stranger, upon learning of my “condition” felt it his duty to tell me that I had a lot of balls to think that I should ever have sex again. That apparently I had given up my right for human affection, human contact and sexual gratification the day I failed the most important test of my life; who was I to try to have sex and infect others. Now of course the initial knee-jerk response is that this guy was obviously an ignorant, uncaring moron and that I should pay him no mind. But sadly he is not the first, and I am sure he will not be the last, to tell me such a thing.
I don’t look for pity or even empathy for who I am. Like I said, I made my bed and in it I must lay. But at a time when the country is at a crossroads in determining just how “equal” we as gay men are, can we really expect them to understand if we as a sub-culture can’t even find respect and compassion amongst ourselves? I mean it’s not like I don’t tell guys my status; I don’t try to hide it or deny it. Yet over half the time upon revealing it you get the look; the look that makes you feel like a modern-day leper. I made a mistake, albeit a rather stupid and severe mistake, but who among us havn’t? Do I suddenly become less of a person because of this? Do I no longer have the right to the same happiness as any other man?
Now I know these stories aren’t supposed to be tirades or rants or whatever about social injustice, but I think sometimes we as gay men need to just take a step back. We want to be treated as equally as our heterosexual counterparts, yet we are always quick to discriminate against other gays who are “less than ourselves”. When does it become right for the “victim” to become the “victimizer”? Never…it never does. We are all human and deserve to be treated with respect and compassion. Just try to remember that the next time you complain about how you are treated by another. Think what it would feel like if the shoe was on the other foot. Would you degrade someone just to make yourself feel safer, all because of your own fears and misunderstandings?
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