Abysmal Stats

Blacks are contracting HIV at twice the rate they were in the late 1980s and early '90s, which researchers and AIDS prevention advocates attribute to drug addiction, poverty and poor access to health care, according to government statistics.

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So goes the beginning lines of the troubling story of HIV infection. One wonders how in this day and age are rates like this a possibility? Have we not come further than this? Drug addiction and poverty are elements, that unfortunately, are too heavy a burden to eliminate effectively when dealing with HIV rates. How often, though the persons are trying to be diligent, do persons relapse into drug addiction? How difficult is it for those who are poor to rise above the doldrums of the despair that is poverty? It takes sometimes years for a family to rise above the poverty line and is often not possible unless those persons have acquired schooling. Drug abuse and poverty often go hand in hand as a person caught up in the ugliness of poverty may try to deadened the pain of such with drugs, and vice versa, a person who becomes involved with drugs will inevitably spiral into a poverty they may have never experienced nor recover from easily. To try to concentrate efforts against this one-two punch combination of poverty and drug abuse is not the way in which to advance against the scourge of HIV as they may be insurmountable. These two elements of those lives who are a part of the statistics mentioned are such that they may be everlasting, and as such, the concentration in how to prevent HIV should lie in the hands of health care providers and the institutions in which they work.

Health care providers are at the fore front of the war against HIV and AIDS. They are the people that see, first hand, the effects this virus directly has on afflicted individuals physically and psychologically. These effects are devastating to say the least, and who better to identify the new trends in the effect of HIV and also be the first line to identify what may be new trends in how it, the disease, is acquired. Health care workers also see, secondarily, how it effects the afflicted persons personal relationships within their communities and families, and as such, may then be able to disseminate information to social workers who can than address whatever social anomaly (drug addiction, poverty, etc.) that has resulted or pre-existed.

What is more probable in bringing about change concerning this new urgency for the elimination, or at least, the suppression of HIV rates, is access to health care. This access to health care is the front line defense to all elements of this dreaded disease. It will take much too much time and money to eliminate or decrease poverty and drug abuse, so why not concentrate on the one thing is this fight against HIV/AIDS that is achievable. Health care access, though it can prove to be as costly as the other two, is the first thing all who are willing to fight must concentrate their endeavors toward to realistically have a chance at victory against one of the most dreaded disease of modern time.