October 12, 2007

NATIONAL LATINO AIDS AWARENESS DAY: MONDAY OCT. 15

For the last month, people around the country have been celebrating Hispanic Heritage month, but those celebrations will culminate with a call to action: On Monday, October 15, some 1,000 organizations in 350 cities will mark National Latino AIDS Awareness Day (NLAAD) to bring attention to a disease which affects Latinos in disproportionate numbers.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Latinos account for 20 percent of those living with HIV/AIDS but make up only 14 percent of the population. The AIDS case rate among Latino adults/adolescents was the second highest of any racial/ethnic group in the U.S. (25 per 100,000 people) and 3.5 times that of whites in 2004. More than 75,000 Latinos have died of AIDS.

Here in New York City, Latinos account for approximately one-third of the city's 100,000 people living with HIV/AIDS. New HIV infections among Latinas have plummeted almost 50 percent since 2002 but most other statistics are less encouraging. The number of new AIDS diagnoses among Latinos (men and women), for example, has barely changed since 2002.

For the last year, Latino AIDS advocates and others in the AIDS community have been galvanized by the ongoing AIDS crisis in Puerto Rico, where mismanagement of AIDS funds has frayed the commonwealth's AIDS infrastructure and left unknown numbers of people without access to medications. A handful of groups are using NLAAD as an opportunity to do a phone zap of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, in hopes of prompting him to take immediate action. If you're interested in joining the Campaign to End AIDS, Puerto Rico and New York chapters of Unidos Dandole Cara La Al SIDA, National Minority AIDS Council and Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project in the phone zap,go to http://www.c2ea.org/subscribe.html