The New York City Department of Health announced an initiative to administer HIV tests to the estimated 250,000 untested 18- to 64-year-olds in The Bronx over the next three years. According to the New York Post:
The Bronx [...] has the city’s highest AIDS-death rate, [health department] officials said.
The borough’s residents account for one-third of the city’s annual deaths from the illness and one-fourth of all new cases.
In 2006, a quarter of the people who tested positive for HIV in The Bronx already had full-blown AIDS, the officials said.
Living with AIDS in New York
In NEW YORK VOICES “Living with AIDS/HIV,” you can meet a New Yorker living with the disease. Pam was infected with HIV in her teens. She is married, working, and raising children. Her story, as she is first to insist, is about living with AIDS, not dying of it. But it is not an easy road. Watch the video.
For more information, including videos about who is most at risk for infection and what volunteers are doing to prevent the spread of HIV among youths, visit NEW YORK VOICES online.
To find free and anonymous HIV testing locations near you visit the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene online.
[via Gothamist]
Whether it’s at the hospital, doctors office, clinic or using the home test available at pharmacies and on-line home health screening companies, the bottom line is that people need to get tested. The CDC estimates 25% of those infected with HIV are just not aware that they have been infected. Testing is the only way to know for sure.
Yes. But all of us work jobs, we all have lives. Do you know how hardit is going to be to get half of the people in my neighborhood to even consider going.