Charlotte, N.C. -- It was a scientific discovery that no scientist wanted to make, an outbreak one likened to a looming genocide of young, black men.
In November 2002, North Carolina health officials began a new form of blood testing designed to catch HIV infection far sooner than standard screening, which often doesn't detect the virus for two or three months after it enters the body. They quickly found five HIV cases in people with infections so fresh they had tested negative in conventional screenings. Surprisingly, two were black college students from the same small town, yet they didn't know each other.
"That got us to thinking there might be a problem," said Dr. Peter Leone, an AIDS researcher with the state Department of Health.
He and others began reviewing known HIV cases in North Carolina college men dating back to 2000. They were alarmed at what they found. In 2000, the number infected with HIV was six. In 2001, it was 19. By 2002 the number was 29. By the end of 2003, it had jumped to 84, and 73 of them -- 88 percent -- were black. Interviews with the students uncovered a total of 119 HIV cases once their sexual contacts were added in, and indicated a network of sexual activity spanning two dozen colleges in six states and the District of Columbia.
"There has never been a description of a cluster of HIV cases among college students like this, ever," said Leone, who called the trend a "potential genocidal issue" affecting young black men. "It's not a good foretelling of where HIV is moving," he said. "This is the next wave."
The numbers are indicative of the racial disparity involving the spread of AIDS in the United States, where blacks comprise 12 percent of the population but accounted for 54 percent of new HIV cases in 2002, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
When new cases are concentrated in such a young population, as in North Carolina's college students, researchers say the numbers are particularly ominous because of the potential threat to the best and the brightest of America's young black men. [...] Researchers, educators and students are trying to determine what led to the spike and how to stop it, an effort that is forcing them to confront issues such as homosexuality and bisexuality that are often ignored or hushed up in the black community. In addition, it is highlighting some of the shortfalls of AIDS education programs, which blacks say for too long have presented the disease as one of older gay, white men.
"I ask people, 'How do you get AIDS,' and they say, 'Oh, by being gay,'" said DeMishea Charleston, 20, a student at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, N.C., who teaches fellow students about HIV and AIDS. She is among 32 so-called peer educators at the school, which is in the system of historically black colleges.
Here's the thing: they found this cluster in North Carolina because they were looking for it, more or less. They did preliminary tests that found something odd, did more tests, and discovered what was out there.
But that's just one state and one cluster. The behavior of people probably isn't going to be any different away from North Carolina and in some other place. So one wonders: what's happening in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi ... The discovery of this cluster in North Carolina would suggest that you've probably got similar clusters around any of the historically black colleges, and for much the same reasons. But nobody knows about them, because they haven't had the chance to look. And now that the study's been publicized, they'll have fewer chances to find information, because that's the sort of thing that nobody wants to know, and nobody wants revealed.
Posted by iain at August 18, 2004 11:49 AM
