WASHINGTON (March 16) — A new report by Washington, D.C., health officials says that at least 3 percent of residents in the nation’s capital are living with HIV or AIDS and every mode of transmission is on the rise.
“Our rates are higher than West Africa,” Shannon L. Hader, director of the District’s HIV/AIDS Administration, told The Washington Post for a story that appeared in Sunday’s editions. “They’re on par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya.”
Check out the gallery below on the nation’s five most AIDS-ridden metropolitan areas. Why doesn’t Washington lead the list? Though the infection rate in the city limits is the nation’s highest, the rates in the surrounding suburbs pull it down slightly. The findings in the 2008 epidemiology report by the D.C. HIV/AIDS Administration point to a severe epidemic that’s affecting every race and sex across the population and neighborhoods.
The 3 percent figure means about 15,120 people in the District have HIV or AIDS and is well over the 1 percent threshold for a general epidemic, the Post reported. The newspaper noted that the numbers are close to the 4 percent infection rate recorded in San Francisco at the peak if its epidemic, in 1992.
Scheduled to be released Monday, the report says that the number of HIV and AIDS cases jumped 22 percent from the nearly 12,500 reported in 2006. Almost 1 in 10 residents between ages 40 and 49 are living with HIV, and black men had the highest infection rate at almost 7 percent.
The report says that the virus is most often transmitted by men having sex with men, followed by heterosexual transmission and injection drug use.
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