A report released this month by D.C. health officials, noted that at least 3 percent of Washington’s residents are HIV-positive or have AIDS and every mode of transmission is on the rise.

 

“Our rates are higher than West Africa. They’re on par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya,” Shannon L. Hader, director of the District’s HIV/AIDS Administration, said. Sub-Saharan Africa is considered the epicenter of the global malady, accounting for more than two thirds of all people living with HIV globally.

 

Hader was one of the leaders of the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s work in Zimbabwe. She added that “we have every mode of transmission going up, all on the rise, and we have to deal with them.”

 

The report found a 22 percent increase in HIV and AIDS cases from the 12,428 reported at the end of 2006. Black men have an infection rate of nearly 7 percent, carrying the weight of the disease. About 1 in 10 D.C. residents between the ages of 40 and 49 has the virus. The disease’s leading mode of transmission has remained men having sex with men, closely followed by heterosexual transmission and injection drug use. Three percent of black women carry the virus, partly a result of the increase in heterosexual transmissions.

 

“This is very, very depressing news, especially considering HIV's profound impact on minority communities,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Health's program on infectious diseases, as quoted by the Associated Press.