ACCORDING TO a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report, African-Americans are 10 times more likely to contract HIV/AIDS than their white counterparts.Veteran reporter and syndicated columnist Gil L. Robertson IV knows this fact all too well: His brother Jeffrey D. Robertson was diagnosed as HIV-positive in the mid-1980s.
The people of Washington, D.C., should be intimately aware of this stat, too, but too often we're not. It's estimated that one in every 20 adults in the District is HIV-positive, with 82 percent of those being African-Americans.
D.C. also has the highest rate of new AIDS cases per 100,000 people in the U.S.
That's 10 times the national average.
It's stark numbers like these, plus his family's own story, that led Robertson to create the book "Not in My Family: AIDS in the African-American Community"
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Labels: African American
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