United Press International - Wednesday, 22 August 2001

"Every hour in this country, 7 people in America are come down with HIV and 3 out of those 7 are African-Americans --blacks make up 56 percent of all new HIV infections and yet we are only 13 percent of the national population -- we are in an epidemic here," Debra Fraser-Howze, head of the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS, told United Press International.

"We are calling upon the state of New York to declare a state of emergency in HIV/AIDS and public health in African-American, Latino and other communities of color, and for increased funding to targeted communities."

Representatives of the National Black Leadership Commission, the Latino Commission on AIDS, Addiction Research & Treatment, the New York City Department of Health, Housing Works, Gay Men of African Descent, members of clergy and political officials said they wanted to emphasize a new union of blacks and Latinos to address public health issues and that funding to address HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment for minority communities must increase.

"Funding has to be targeted to the populations most at risk, the black and Latino community because 80 percent of all new infections of HIV/AIDS are in the minority communities but only 29 percent of the resources end up in the minority community," Fraser-Howze said. "We cannot sit by and allow ourselves to die."

The Centers for Disease Control has estimated that 1 in 50 black men and 1 in 160 black women is infected with HIV, making them 10 times more likely than whites to be diagnosed with AIDS and 10 times more likely to die from it, Maurice Franklin, of Gay Men of African Descent, told UPI. The coalition is also asking for $540 million in federal funding, however, New York City has more HIV cases than the next three states put together, according to Fraser-Howze. New York City has funded $5 million for education and prevention.

"We are 20 years behind in fighting HIV than the white gay community," Franklin said. "The increase in HIV is in young gay minority men under the age of 30."

As of the year 2000, an estimated 125,000 American children have been left behind as a result of losing one or both parents to AIDS, and 80 percent of whom are African-American or Latino, according to Fraser-Howze. Minorities and blacks in particular bear a disproportionate burden when it comes to chronic disease in the United States often because of a lack of access to health car facilities.

"There are other barriers as well, often the church and family in the black community consider the homosexual lifestyle a sin," said Franklin. "However, a big barrier to reaching young black men is their feeling that they won't live until the age of 30 so there's a felling of 'why bother.'"

"With blacks facing poverty, a lack of future, increasing suicide rates, black-on-black crime, police brutality, sometimes it hard to convince a young black man that he's worth saving and it's worth taking precautions if he feels he going to die anyway," Franklin added.

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