Jun 17, 2005  |  By: RYAN LEE  | COMMENTS     

ATLANTA — The rate of HIV in several groups of black gay and bisexual men in the U.S. dwarfs that in many Third World countries, according to data highlighted this week during the 2005 National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta.

The conference also revealed risky sexual behavior is on the rise among many sectors of gay and bisexual men who struggle with burnout after more than two decades of HIV prevention and confront new challenges like the growing use of crystal methamphetamine.

Some 46 percent of black men in a five-city study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention were HIV-positive, making black men who have sex with men nearly twice as likely to be infected with HIV than other gay and bisexual men. Among the black men in the study who were living with HIV, 67 percent did not know their status.

In Baltimore, a study of gay and bisexual men found that 46 percent of the black men in the study were HIV positive, a rate more than four times higher than that of white gay men in the sample.

Throughout the four-day prevention conference, public health experts and AIDS activists sounded desperate alarms about the spread of HIV among black men who have sex with men, calling infection rates among that group “appallingly high,” “off the scale and unforgivable,” and “an extremely serious health problem.”

“One population in urgent need of tailored prevention messages is African-American gay and bisexual men,” said Ron Valdiserri, deputy director of HIV, STD and TB prevention programs at CDC.

But several black gay activists attending the conference said the latest data reflect years of public health researchers either ignoring black gay and bisexual men, or targeting them with cookie-cutter prevention strategies that do not address their particular concerns.

“It’s not new. We saw this trend happening quite a number of years ago, and we did not do enough,” said Phill Wilson, executive director of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles. “Now the question is, how many of us have to be HIV-positive before we develop a comprehensive response to end this epidemic?”

In what they called the “clearest picture to date” of the scope of the HIV epidemic in the U.S., CDC officials announced that between 1.04 million and 1.19 million Americans are living with HIV, 74 percent of whom are male.

Gay and bisexual men continue to comprise the largest transmission group, accounting for 45 percent of all infections, followed by heterosexuals that make up 27 percent of cases.

African-Americans account for 12 percent of the U.S. population but comprise 47 percent of all HIV cases, according to the CDC data released Monday.

Studies presented at the conference showed that HIV is a crisis for black gay men across generations.

A study of 1,767 gay and bisexual men in Baltimore, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City and San Francisco conducted from June 2004 to April 2005 showed black gay men increased their risk for contracting HIV as they aged.

“The data indicate the HIV prevalence among black [gay and bisexual men] increases dramatically with age, with 14 percent of those aged 18-24 years infected, and nearly 30 percent of men in their 30s infected,” Valdiserri said.

The HIV rate for gay men 13-24 years old declined by 30 percent from 1994 to 1998, but skyrocketed 41 percent from 1999 to 2003, according to data from 25 states with name-based HIV reporting.

“The increasing HIV diagnoses among young males were primarily due to a 47 percent increase among [gay and bisexual men] ages 20-24; 60 percent of these men were black,” said Maria Rangel, a CDC researcher.

In one of the first studies targeting men who have sex with men on the down low, researchers found that the popular media depiction of black men who primarily have sex with women but also engage in sex with men does not accurately reflect the men who consider themselves on the down low.

The 12-city study involved 328 gay and bisexual men who said they were familiar with the term down low; 28 percent of participants said they identified themselves as on the DL. Some 43 percent of black participants identified as down low, compared to 26 percent of Latinos and 7 percent of white participants.

Some 40 percent of the men who identified as being ...