Indiana youth experiencing HIV crisis but need help

Last Saturday was World AIDS Day. This gives me the chance to write about a cause that is very important to me.

Recently, I discovered some shocking statistics about HIV/AIDS in this state.

According to 2010 data, the most recent year available, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Indiana ranks above the national average in male-to-male sexual contact as a source of HIV transmission and below the national average in people age 18-64 who report ever having been tested for HIV/AIDS.

The most troubling statistic is the change in age distribution of new HIV diagnoses in Indiana.

Diagnoses of HIV in this state tend to be in younger individuals compared to national averages, and they are getting younger.

According to the CDC, 21 percent of HIV diagnoses in Indiana and linked to male-to-male sexual contact in 2007 were individuals younger than 24.

By 2010, that number had practically leaped to 31 percent, while the total number of cases linked to male-to-male sexual contact in the state increased 14 percent.

For perspective, between 2007 and 2010, new diagnoses of HIV in Indiana across all transmission categories increased only 4 percent, and no other transmission category showed any significant change.

So what does this all mean?

It means that HIV/AIDS prevention programs in the state of Indiana need to be reevaluated.

Carriers are getting younger and more concentrated in male-to-male sexual conduct, which means younger men are either having more or more risky sexual relations.

It means they’re probably having more unprotected sex. And without some sort of change, these numbers aren’t going to go anywhere but up.

Indiana is experiencing an HIV/AIDS crisis.

Thirty years after the name AIDS was first used by the CDC, the numbers are moving in the wrong direction, and no one is talking about it.

Well I am, and I’m not going to stop.

Honestly, although I find the statistics striking, I don’t find the facts themselves terribly surprising.

A fellow IDS columnist recently wrote that he had only been handed a condom once on this campus.

Men who are young, closeted and engaging in sexual contact with other men in secret are probably not swaggering into CVS the next morning to replenish their dwindling supply of Trojans.

But even openly gay men perceive HIV as less of a death sentence than in past generations.

Condoms are a fabulous solution to this problem, and they are simple to use, inexpensive and most importantly, sex-positive.

It’s enough to make a columnist want to start passing them out himself between classes.

­— drlreed@indiana.edu