HIV Rates Among Black Americans Remain Disproportionately High

October 6, 2009 6:39 a.m. EST

Chapel Hill, NC (AHN) - HIV prevalence among black Americans continues to far exceed rates among whites, despite billions of dollars in government and private spending to combat the disease, according to researchers with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The researchers wrote in a new report appearing in the November issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine that black HIV rates are 10 times higher than white Americans.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 45 percent of new HIV infections in the United States in 2006 occurred among non-Hispanic blacks. Among 13,184 adolescents and young adults in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, HIV rates among young black Americans were 20 times higher than those among their white peers.

The researchers say individual-level sexual behavior contributes to the disparity, but they placed more blame in what they term "structural violence" - a social system "characterized by inequalities in power and life chances of sufficient magnitude to restrict a group of people from realizing their full potential" that puts them "in harm's way," the researchers said in a statement.