- HIV/AIDS-poverty link strongest in the South, By Steve Sternberg and Jack Gillum, July 10, 2011, USA Today: “Nearly all U.S. counties stricken with both high rates of HIV infection and poverty are located in Southern states, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data from 43 states. The study, which drew on data made available from Emory University’s AIDSVu project, offers the clearest picture yet of the close kinship of low income and HIV/AIDS. ‘This tells a story about heavily impacted regions across the South,’ says Patrick Sullivan, leader of the team at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health that produced AIDSVu, the first effort to use state-of-the-art methods to map HIV infection rates by county. ‘Seeing the data on a map helps you see things in a different way,’ Sullivan says. The analysis highlights a vast geographic shift in the HIV epidemic in the USA in the three decades since the first cases of a deadly new disease were reported in gay men by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1981…”
- Lack of education fuels HIV epidemic in South, By Steve Sternberg and Jack Gillum, July 10, 2011, USA Today: “Until his death in March, bluesman ‘Big’ Jack Johnson of Clarksdale, Miss., crisscrossed the troubled terrain of the Mississippi Delta, singing of broken homes and broken hearts. His songs touched on all the timeless blues themes of poverty, abuse, abandonment and longing. Johnson also took on a newer heartache – HIV/AIDS – that is sweeping through the Delta and much of the rest of the South. And he confronted it head-on…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty