Southern states are now epicenter of HIV/AIDS in the U.S.
New Yorker Deadra Malloy was diagnosed with HIV in 1988, but she remained healthy for so long that she wasn’t completely convinced she was positive. When she started getting sick in 2006, she decided to embrace her “ancestral roots” and accepted a job down South, where her mother was from.
Malloy didn’t know that the move, first to North Carolina and then to Columbia, S.C., would make it much more difficult to manage her disease. New York offers free health care, including HIV drugs, to HIV-positive state residents who are uninsured or underinsured, while assistance is harder to come by in North Carolina and South Carolina. A single mother of two at the time of her move, Malloy couldn’t afford her medication, which cost upward of $2,500 a month. So she did without it for nearly a year — and ended up in an emergency room with a raging case of pneumonia.
“New York was already way ahead” with services for AIDS patients, says Malloy, now 52, who formed P.O.S.I.T.I.V.E. Voices, an advocacy group for women living with HIV/AIDS in South Carolina. “There were times I wanted to run back to New York. But I didn’t want to see anybody die [in South Carolina] who didn’t have to.”
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Southern states now have the highest rates of new HIV diagnoses, the largest percentage of people living with the disease and the most people dying from it, according to Rainey Campbell, executive director of the Southern AIDS Coalition, a nonprofit serving 16 Southern states and the District. Fifty percent of all new HIV cases are in the South. And the HIV infection rate among African American and Latina women in the South now rivals that of sub-Saharan Africa. In some Southern states, blacks account for more than 80 percent of new HIV diagnoses among women.
States in the South have the least expansive Medicaid programs and the strictest eligibility requirements to qualify for assistance, which prevents people living with HIV/AIDS from getting care, according to a coalition report. In the South, Campbell said, people living with HIV have to reach disability status before they qualify for aid. This is significant, because nationally the vast majority of HIV/AIDS patients rely on Medicaid for their health insurance, according to research conducted by the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/southern-states-are-now-epicenter-of-hivaids-in-the-us/2014/09/22/9ac1525a-39e6-11e4-9c9f-ebb47272e40e_story.html
