Five Takeaways from the 2015 U.S. Conference on AIDS | Human Rights Campaign

17.9.15

Five Takeaways from the 2015 U.S. Conference on AIDS | Human Rights Campaign: 1.) The numbers don’t lie.

The theme of this year’s conference was The Numbers Don’t Lie: It’s Time to End Health Disparities - a fitting title given the current realities of HIV. While HIV continues to affects Americans from all walks of life, the data make clear that some communities are much more heavily impacted than others. For example, gay and bisexual men make-up approximately 2% of the American population but roughly 63% of new HIV cases. Moreover, transgender women are 49 times more likely to contract HIV than their cisgender (i.e. non-transgender) counterparts. A number of factors explain such huge disparities, but the lesson here is that we will not be able to end the epidemic until we stem the tide of new infections among those hit hardest by HIV.