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50% of New Aids Cases In America Are In The South


debrand

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http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/26 ... h-20120726

This is just sad.

I've got to work on a paper but I accidentally stumbled on this information and needed to share it with you guys. Instead of analyzing the article-which is very good-I'll just put up some quotes for those who don't want to read the entire article.

The South has the highest rate of AIDS deaths of any U.S. region. It also has the largest numbers of adolescents and adults living with HIV and the fewest resources to fight the epidemic.

The disease there is concentrated largely in poor minority communities. Diagnoses tend to be late and often only after the infection has progressed to AIDS. Treatment is less effective at that stage, and that's assuming it is even available. Thousands of those living with the human immunodeficiency virus are unable to get the medications they need, waiting in limbo for slots to open up in state AIDS drug assistance programs. President Obama recently pledged to eliminate these waiting lists, and I hope he does.

In Mississippi, the AIDS death rate is 60% higher than the national average, and about 50% of the people who know they are living with HIV are not receiving care, about the same percentage of nontreatment as in Ethiopia.

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Sadly, it makes sense. Lack of sex education robs people of knowledge on how to effectively protect themselves, poverty and lack of healthcare delays diagnoses, and poverty and lack of healthcare delays or prevents treatments.

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It seems to make sense to me too sadly. Abstinence only education is most common in the South, and that leads to more STDs. In the US healthcare is very expensive if you don't have insurance and with a higher level of poverty in the South, there will be more people who won't get medical treatment because they can't afford it. This is one of the reasons comprehensive sex ed and universal healthcare are very important. Even if it makes sense, it's still very sad.

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I am sadly not surprised at all by this. What Valsa said is very true, but there are a lot of people here that still feel that HIV/AIDS is a judgement from God. (Only "bad" people get this disease so we don't need to fight it.) I don't believe this of course, but it explains too much of why we didn't tackle HIV and we were OK with sacrificing sub-Saharan Africa. Who cares if all these people die? They're the wrong sexual orientation or the wrong skin color or whatever.

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Sadly, it makes sense. Lack of sex education robs people of knowledge on how to effectively protect themselves, poverty and lack of healthcare delays diagnoses, and poverty and lack of healthcare delays or prevents treatments.

:text-yeahthat:

Add in the anti-college, anti-intellectual attitudes and you get multi-generational, entrenched poverty to go with it and a population that's easy to manipulate by corrupt politicians and corporate wankers who just make it even worse.

Which is why none of this is surprising.

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:text-yeahthat:

Add in the anti-college, anti-intellectual attitudes and you get multi-generational, entrenched poverty to go with it and a population that's easy to manipulate by corrupt politicians and corporate wankers who just make it even worse.

Which is why none of this is surprising.

QFT. I'm not surprised by this at all.

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Sadly, it makes sense. Lack of sex education robs people of knowledge on how to effectively protect themselves, poverty and lack of healthcare delays diagnoses, and poverty and lack of healthcare delays or prevents treatments.

valsa,

You are so right. It is so frustrating to live in an abstinence only education state and have other parents not understand why it is a travesty. Especially because Memphis deals with lots of socio-economic issues that are just made worse by crappy sex education.

My son played a game that is part of the official curriculum of his school district that was rage producing in me last year. We have taken to calling it AIDS ball and it was as bad as it sounds. Not only did it perpetuate myths about HIV it moralized sex.

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Look how well abstinence is working guys! See, see see? If they didn't have sex, people wouldn't get AIDS/HIV anyways. The Word of God would fix everything if you would just obey!!!!!111!!!!eleventy11one1!

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50% aren't in the South in other words. I don't know the exact population breakdown, what percentage of people live in the American south vs. what percentage do not, but I think sex ed is bad everywhere. S Dakota I think it is has almost no family planning clinics left for instance.

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The Northeast and California are definitely more densely populated than the states that made up the confederacy.

Personally, I have never considered Texas part of the south. To me it is the beginning of the west, and is VERY different culturally from the states that made up the antebellum south.

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50% aren't in the South in other words. I don't know the exact population breakdown, what percentage of people live in the American south vs. what percentage do not, but I think sex ed is bad everywhere. S Dakota I think it is has almost no family planning clinics left for instance.

in might be bad in many places, but it is codified to be bad in most of the south.

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The Northeast and California are definitely more densely populated than the states that made up the confederacy.

Personally, I have never considered Texas part of the south. To me it is the beginning of the west, and is VERY different culturally from the states that made up the antebellum south.

it is, but it is often politically the same as the mid and deep south. I am not sure if they are an abstinence only state

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Personally, I have never considered Texas part of the south. To me it is the beginning of the west, and is VERY different culturally from the states that made up the antebellum south.

I would consider east Texas (Kilgore, Henderson) to share southern culture. I agree with you about other parts of the state. My area is more midwestern than southern.

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I would consider east Texas (Kilgore, Henderson) to share southern culture. I agree with you about other parts of the state. My area is more midwestern than southern.

for sure on east Texas. I spent a lot of time in henderson for my previous job. Indistinguishable from memphis

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for sure on east Texas. I spent a lot of time in henderson for my previous job. Indistinguishable from memphis

I have spent most of the times I have visited Texas along the Dallas-Austin-San Antonio stretch, though I have been as far as El Paso in the west and Houston in the east. The native Texan women I have met do not suffer putting their headships on pedastals, and seem to be fairly practical people, even if they are a tad more religious then I'm used to. JMO

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I have spent most of the times I have visited Texas along the Dallas-Austin-San Antonio stretch, though I have been as far as El Paso in the west and Houston in the east. The native Texan women I have met do not suffer putting their headships on pedastals, and seem to be fairly practical people, even if they are a tad more religious then I'm used to. JMO

I don't run into the women putting headships on a pedestal in Memphis either.

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I don't run into the women putting headships on a pedestal in Memphis either.

Yeah, that was not the best description I have ever given. Let me try this again. As a woman from the northeast who has talked to other women from the northeast about this, I get a weird vibe out of a lot of southern women. Educated, working, big power in how the family is run, but...............there is what looks to ME, based on what I'm used to, as a default setting a lot of southern women take in public. They are overly nice, and quite frankly, sometimes play dumb so as not to hurt what they perceive as the man's fragile ego. Now I'm sure a lot of southern women consider me overly rude and lacking in finesse when dealing with the opposite sex. Point taken. I never saw a woman in San Antonio who would act dimmer than I know she was in order to get along. I have seen this many times in Alabama and South Carolina. These women are calling the shots and carrying the team, I don't understand why they insist on keeping sweet about it.

Like I said, my perception, and not at all meant to imply that southern women patterned their lives after Michelle Duggar. But there is a big difference region to region.

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I have spent most of the times I have visited Texas along the Dallas-Austin-San Antonio stretch, though I have been as far as El Paso in the west and Houston in the east. The native Texan women I have met do not suffer putting their headships on pedastals, and seem to be fairly practical people, even if they are a tad more religious then I'm used to. JMO

True to both of the bolded, in my experience. I was thinking about that in the "Religion and Region" thread. Most of Texas is not the south. The areas may both be religious, but the culture and the accents are not the same. The history here is very different, it's one of people ekking it out in a tough climate, not elitists on plantations, and accordingly many of us have a stubborn, suffer-no-bullshit streak.

The problem is that nowadays many of us consider things like "science" and "critical thinking skills" to be bullshit.

ETA: I didn't see AreteJo's post but I think she nailed it. Bluntness, almost rudeness, is part of the culture here that's absent in the South.

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Yeah, that was not the best description I have ever given. Let me try this again. As a woman from the northeast who has talked to other women from the northeast about this, I get a weird vibe out of a lot of southern women. Educated, working, big power in how the family is run, but...............there is what looks to ME, based on what I'm used to, as a default setting a lot of southern women take in public. They are overly nice, and quite frankly, sometimes play dumb so as not to hurt what they perceive as the man's fragile ego. Now I'm sure a lot of southern women consider me overly rude and lacking in finesse when dealing with the opposite sex. Point taken. I never saw a woman in San Antonio who would act dimmer than I know she was in order to get along. I have seen this many times in Alabama and South Carolina. These women are calling the shots and carrying the team, I don't understand why they insist on keeping sweet about it.

Like I said, my perception, and not at all meant to imply that southern women patterned their lives after Michelle Duggar. But there is a big difference region to region.

I can see that actually.

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True to both of the bolded, in my experience. I was thinking about that in the "Religion and Region" thread. Most of Texas is not the south. The areas may both be religious, but the culture and the accents are not the same. The history here is very different, it's one of people ekking it out in a tough climate, not elitists on plantations, and accordingly many of us have a stubborn, suffer-no-bullshit streak.

The problem is that nowadays many of us consider things like "science" and "critical thinking skills" to be bullshit.

ETA: I didn't see AreteJo's post but I think she nailed it. Bluntness, almost rudeness, is part of the culture here that's absent in the South.

I live here, but was not raised here but the south is hardly made up of people who were elitists on the plantation. The African Americans, well that goes without saying and the Caucasians, well plantation live was still the minority.

And while I am not a southern apologist by any means, reconstruction really impacted a lot of white families.

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No, they were hardly all elitist plantation owners, not even close. However, up until the TV era, the lower classes in any society always tried to mimic at least some of the externals of the upper classes. You would consider upper class manners to be the gold standard. That is why I suspect being nice and thought of as nice is so incredibly important in the south compared to other regions in the country. The manners of the class that did not survive were infused and passed down even in the lower classes.

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No, they were hardly all elitist plantation owners, not even close. However, up until the TV era, the lower classes in any society always tried to mimic at least some of the externals of the upper classes. You would consider upper class manners to be the gold standard. That is why I suspect being nice and thought of as nice is so incredibly important in the south compared to other regions in the country. The manners of the class that did not survive were infused and passed down even in the lower classes.

oh I agree with you there. I was just commenting that lots of southern families also eked out a living.

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I wanted to address Glass Cowcatcher's observation that there are now no family planning clinics in South Dakota. I suspect that is a least partially due to the fact that it's hard to recruit doctors to stay in South Dakota. The same thing happens in rural Greece. People like big population centers. So the Greeks actually came up with a solution that works.

Normally, when it comes to services and civil government, people should take a look at what Greece does, and do the exact opposite. :hand: This is an exception. The Greek government pays for all post secondary education in Greece. The exams are brutal and competitve, but once you get into college, you don't have to worry about how your going to come up with tuition money. In exchange for paying for the education of doctors and teachers, both those proffessions are obligated to go wherever the hell the Greek government tells them to for 7 years. That is how isolated or rural schools, hospital, and clinics are staffed. No exceptions.

If the US government paid for medical school, they would be able to direct resources to under served communities. Something to think about.

Edit-riffles

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