Welcome to the Red State HIV Epidemic

[n2doc]

It wasn’t supposed to happen here. Not in Austin, a one-doctor-and-an-ice-cream-shop town of 4,200 in southeastern Indiana, nestled off Interstate 65 on the road from Indianapolis to Louisville, where dusty storefronts sit vacant and many residents, lacking cars, walk to the local market. Not in rural, impoverished Scott County, which had reported fewer than five new cases of HIV infection each year, and just three cases in the past six years. Not in a state where, of the 500 new cases reported annually, only 3 percent are linked to injection drug use.

But it did. And it could happen in many more backwoods towns just as unprepared as Austin.

As the largest HIV/AIDS outbreak in Indiana’s history roils this Hoosier hamlet, it reflects the changing face of the epidemic in the U.S., as a disease that once primarily afflicted gays and minorities in deep-blue cities rises in rural red states. This new evolution of HIV is also forcing a new generation of Republican policymakers to confront its orthodox opposition to remedies such as government-funded needle-exchange programs.

Over the past decade, the virus cascaded from urban cities like San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C., into poor, rural swaths of red states in middle America—opening a new front in the national fight against the spread of HIV. “It started in the coastal states among middle-class white gay men, and then the epidemic evolved into affecting more and more minorities in the South,” says Carlos del Rio, an AIDS researcher at Emory University in Atlanta. “Obviously, now the epidemic is changed. Now, what we're seeing is it impacting the rural communities.”

In this Indiana burg, the virus is not spreading among networks of gay men, but in rapid, cluster-like fashion within jobless white families who inject prescription painkillers with dirty needles.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/red-state-hiv-epidemic-drug-use-republican-governors-118379.html#ixzz3bXGQ0G00

[kenfrequed]

1. This should surprise no one.

Republican "policy makers" did everything they could do to roll back sex education, public assistance, and treatment programs while squashing anything but abstienence. It was a recipe for absolute failure.

[underpants]

2. There's a hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes

-John Prine

I posted about this at least a month ago. I can't remember what the topic du jour was on the networks and DU but this was a WOW headline the first time I saw it.

Actually it was right after Super Bowl week when the topis was Mije Pence's dumbass and hated filled anti-gay law being implemented.

[Doctor_J]

3. you would think that the ignorance in Fox nation would result in some natural selection

taking place. Hopefully it will be relatively quick and that subspecies will evolve out before it does irreparable harm.

[MisterP]

4. of course the way they think they'll see it as evidence that they need even less sex ed

it's a nasty circle

[wordpix]

5. repugs' response to this will be "abstinence"

my friend from the south says people there are either drug users or holy rollers