People in Mississippi just voted to retain their Confederate flag as part of the State flag and they WON. This item above is the major reason I do not want homosexuals around my family or my grandson.....I do not feel sorry for this woman, I feel sorry for someone who might have been with her and then raped someone else - for obviously any client of hers would be about the lowest life on earth. This is how AIDS spreads; and as far as I am concerned this woman was a killer - and they want to take guns away from citizens to protect their families and turn loose these savages in the streets to spread disease. Do I want my little grandson when he goes to school to be in a school with this element running around - little babies born without AIDS.....a Secretary of the UN wants billions to fight AIDS when those bastards and the likes of a Clinton are responsible for the spreading of same? Even horses now have this virus - this HIV/AIDS......everything on the planet is dying unless we protect our children from this element which desires to destroy them ......it is now said this one man wants little 2 year olds to be forced to go to school - half of them aren't even potty trained and would you want your chld to share a bathroom with these potential killers walking the streets spreading this disease. Saba This item made be disgusted; for I feel no sympathy for her......horses when they carry this disease are shot or quarantined and they want people like this walking the streets????? Just Say No to Sodomy. Do you see why the South wanted seregation in articular in sharing bathrooms? Or water fountains and why I believe Jesse Jackson should be sent to jail for spitting in food served to others. Welcome, saba22�� Sign Up for Newsletters� | �Log Out �� Go to Advanced Search July 3, 2001 AIDS AT 20 / In the South, a Different Face AIDS Epidemic Takes Toll on Black Women By KEVIN SACK Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times After years of unprotected sex, Tyeste W. Roney, 20, learned in February that she was H.I.V. positive. Recollections on the Age of AIDS (July 3, 2001) Product to Protect Women From H.I.V. Is Elusive (July 3, 2001) Expanded Coverage Join a Discussion on the AIDS Epidemic Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times Dr. Hamza O. Brimah, the only AIDS specialist in a nine-county area around Greenwood, Miss., examined Tyeste W. Roney at his clinic. Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times Jean, with a mask partly concealing her face, contracted AIDS after years of unprotected sex. ``I guess I just blocked it out of my mind,�� she said. GREENWOOD, Miss. � Here in the rural South, the image of AIDS today looks very much like Tyeste W. Roney. Not a gay white man. Not a crack-addicted prostitute. But a 20-year-old black woman with a gold stud in her nose, an orange bandanna covering her braids, and her nickname, Easha, tattooed on one leg. [Saba Note and I wonder who pierced her ear and put a stud in her snout? And tattooed her leg - with her track record think it was done by someone who followed strict safety standards? Did some little kids may have their ears pierced using same needle?] In the back of her mind at least, Ms. Roney had known for years that she could contract H.I.V. by having unprotected sex. Her mother had been telling her so since Ms. Roney was 13, when she lost her virginity. But either the lesson did not stick, or Ms. Roney did not have the power to negotiate safer sex with older lovers. She says that many of the men she can count as partners did not use condoms. [Saba Note: Isn't this lovely conversation for the newspapers - keep in mind 1 in 5 black homosexuals have AIDS] In February, after enduring 10 days of bleeding, Ms. Roney went to a health clinic. First a nurse surprised her by telling her that she had been pregnant and had miscarried. Then the nurse asked Ms. Roney if she knew she was carrying the virus that causes AIDS. "I said, `Get out of here, that can�t be so,� " Ms. Roney recalled. "I just broke down and cried. I thought I wasn�t going to be here long. Maybe a month." It is a scene that has become all too familiar for poor black women here in the Mississippi Delta and across the rural South. Even as the AIDS epidemic has subsided elsewhere in the United States, it has taken firm root among women in places like Greenwood, where messages about prevention and protection are often overtaken by the daily struggle to get by. Researchers say that in many ways the epidemic in the South more closely resembles the situation of the developing world than of the rest of the country. Joblessness, substance abuse, teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, inadequate schools, minimal access to health care and entrenched poverty all conspire here to thwart the progress that has been made among other high-risk groups, particularly gay men. While AIDS rates in the United States remain lower among women than men, women now account for a fourth of all newly diagnosed cases, double the percentage from 10 years ago. That growth has largely been driven by the disproportionate spread of the disease among heterosexual black women, particularly in the South. For those who contract H.I.V. or AIDS in the rural South, life can become intensely isolated. Because of widespread misunderstandings about the ways H.I.V. is transmitted, the stigma facing those who are infected is often suffocating. [Saba Note: If horseflies carry horse AIDS/HIV, etc., and infect horses....well think about that one] Many women are terrified to tell even their families, and they find their only comfort in the monthly meetings of a support group. One woman here, who lives with her son, is convinced that he would make her eat on paper plates and would keep her away from her grandchildren if he knew of her illness. Ms. Roney, who has informed only her family members, said she lost several neighborhood friends after they saw a health department van pull into her driveway to pick her up for a clinic visit. [Saba Note: Oh make her eat on paper plates and not see grandchildren anymore - what the hell did she expect, to share spoons and forks with the grandchildren and maybe a toothbrush] Black women, who make up 7 percent of the nation's population, accounted for 16 percent of all new AIDS diagnoses in 1999, a percentage that has grown steadily since the syndrome was first identified 20 years ago. By comparison, black men made up 35 percent, white men 27 percent, Latino men 14 percent, and white and Latino women were each 4 percent. [and what percenter homosexual lesbian and bi sexual????] While the number of new AIDS cases in the United States began to decline in the mid-1990's, the reversal started later for Southern black women, and the drop has been slower. >From 1981 to 1999, 26,522 black women developed AIDS in the 11 states of the former Confederacy. In Mississippi and North Carolina, statistics show that more black women than white men have contracted H.I.V. over the epidemic's course. Unless a cure is found, the share of AIDS patients who are black and female is likely to rise. The trend is strikingly visible in Southern states with large black populations. Here in Mississippi, 28.5 percent of those reporting new H.I.V. infections in 2000 were black women, up from 13 percent in 1990. In Alabama, the number rose to 31 percent, from 13 percent. In North Carolina, it rose to 27 percent, from 18 percent. "While the H.I.V. epidemic is also increasingly affecting men in the South and black men, the overall trends for women are distinct," concluded researchers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a paper published in March in The Journal of the American Medical Association. "The H.I.V. epidemic in women initially centered on injection drug-using women in the urban Northeast, but now centers on women with heterosexual risk in the South." An Explosive Increase In 1997, Dr. Hamza O. Brimah, a Nigerian- born physician who received training in AIDS care in London and New York, opened the Magnolia Medical Clinic in a strip mall here in affiliation with the Greenwood Leflore Hospital. Dr. Brimah is the only AIDS specialist in a nine-county area. He started with fewer than 10 AIDS patients. Now he has 185. He assumes he is seeing only a fraction of those who are actually infected. "In the beginning, I remembered everybody's name," Dr. Brimah said. "Now I have a hard time. Who's this? Who's that? They're coming at me so fast." Sixty percent of Dr. Brimah's AIDS patients are women and 95 percent are black, in an area where 61 percent of the population is black. Almost all were infected through heterosexual transmission, and a majority, he estimates, came to him with a history of sexually transmitted disease. Research has shown that people with sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia have twice to five times the risk of contracting H.I.V., because the diseases cause ulcerations in protective mucous membranes. The South has consistently had the country's highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases. In 1999, for instance, 9 of the 10 states with the highest rates of gonorrhea and syphilis and 7 of the 10 with the highest rates of chlamydia were in the South, according to C.D.C. figures. Dr. Brimah hears from his patients that H.I.V. is often the least of their worries. "There are issues," he said, "of looking after children, trying to get insurance, the lack of a father in the home, alcohol, drugs. They have so much going on." [Saba: Well is this love American Style and you see the South is not going to take any more crap from anybody with regard to teaching little kids that homosexuality is an alternate lifestyle, that mixing of blood is wonderful and I never to this day ever heard of a Black Rose] Continued 1 | 2 | 3 | Next>> Home | Back to Health | Search | HelpBack to Top List your real estate property on NYTimes.com Post a Job on NYTimes.com �Search NYTimes.com Classifieds �Browse the NYT Store �Play the NYT crossword puzzle online Click Here to Receive 50% Off Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information
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