Alabama is one of 33 states that mandates HIV education in high schools. Among those states, students receive an average of 2.2 hours of education, and most focus on abstinence. [AIDS in Black America: A Public Health Crisis]
When I started doing this work in 1986, roughly 20 percent of all of the people in the United States who were living with AIDS were African-American. The most recent statistics from the Center for Disease Control indicate that 45 percent of all the new cases of HIV infection are amongst African-Americans. … If we continue on the current trend, in the year 2015, especially in the South, it will probably be the case that 5 to 6 percent of all African-American adults who are sexually active will be infected with the virus.
— Dr. Robert Fullilove, on today’s Fresh Air about AIDS in the African-American community.
by looking at the pace with which viruses evolved, you can reverse engineer your way back into a date range. … Research suggests that the key year was around 1908, but the range is a bit wider – 1884 to 1924. Somewhere in there, the first HIV is loose in the world, has come out of the chimp population and is infecting humans.
— On today’s Fresh Air, the history of the HIV virus.
The ability for a society to grasp the connection between sexual culture and the spread of this epidemic is just essential to reversing it. And it seems like the more the United States or other Western nations get involved, the farther societies get away from that kind of moment of reckoning.
— On today’s Fresh Air, how international AIDS organizations working in Africa went off in the wrong direction in fighting the spread of HIV across the continent.
The difference between the men who were circumcised and the men who weren’t was 8 to 1 in terms of their infectiousness.
Monday: Journalist Craig Timberg says that for years, international AIDS groups overlooked important factors in the spread of the HIV virus, such as the effectiveness of circumcision. Timberg, the former Johannesburg bureau chief for The Washington Post, explores the history of the HIV virus and the efforts to fight the AIDS epidemic in his book Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and how the World Can Finally Overcome It.
Some Interviews Over The Years From Fresh Air