"It wasn't supposed to happen here." Welcome to the red state HIV epidemic.

[riversedge]

POLITICO Magazine ?@POLITICOMag May 29

"It wasn't supposed to happen here." Welcome to the red state HIV epidemic. http://politi.co/1d3IUvI



It wasn’t supposed to happen here. Not in Austin, a one-doctor-and-an-ice-cream-shop town of 4,200 in southeastern Indiana, nestled off Interstate 65 on the road from Indianapolis to Louisville, where dusty storefronts sit vacant and many residents, lacking cars, walk to the local market. Not in rural, impoverished Scott County, which had reported fewer than five new cases of HIV infection each year, and just three cases in the past six years. Not in a state where, of the 500 new cases reported annually, only 3 percent are linked to injection drug use.

But it did. And it could happen in many more backwoods towns just as unprepared as Austin.

As the largest HIV/AIDS outbreak in Indiana’s history roils this Hoosier hamlet, it reflects the changing face of the epidemic in the U.S., as a disease that once primarily afflicted gays and minorities in deep-blue cities rises in rural red states. This new evolution of HIV is also forcing a new generation of Republican policymakers to confront its orthodox opposition to remedies such as government-funded needle-exchange programs.

Over the past decade, the virus cascaded from urban cities like San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C., into poor, rural swaths of red states in middle America—opening a new front in the national fight against the spread of HIV. “It started in the coastal states among middle-class white gay men, and then the epidemic evolved into affecting more and more minorities in the South,” says Carlos del Rio, an AIDS researcher at Emory University in Atlanta. “Obviously, now the epidemic is changed. Now, what we're seeing is it impacting the rural communities.”

In this Indiana burg, the virus is not spreading among networks of gay men, but in rapid, cluster-like fashion within jobless white families who inject prescription painkillers with dirty needles...................

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/red-state-hiv-epidemic-drug-use-republican-governors-118379.html#ixzz3bu0SHfi4




The largest HIV/AIDS outbreak in Indiana’s history reflects the changing face of the epidemic in the U.S http://politi.co/1HRn9Ni

[hobbit709]

1. This is the end result of the extreme stupidity and anti-science thinking of the RW

[Romeo.lima333]

2. and using dirty needles

[hobbit709]

4. Which is made worse by the RW being against anything rational like needle exchange.

[Xipe Totec]

5. And electing dirty pricks to office nt

[Bluenorthwest]

6. In Scott County and other Indiana locations, they closed the Planned Parenthood locations which

provided the only HIV testing and education in the county. Scott County Planned Parenthood closed in 2013, 3 others in the States shut down since 2011, conservative policies by which I mean idiotic, simply stupid, deadly ignorant policies.
They also specifically rejected needle exchange until the crisis was upon them, recalling the Republican tradition of ignoring AIDS until the body count becomes too large to hide.

[Ilsa]

7. Rec this. Nailed it.

Collateral damage from the war on women.

[DetlefK]

3. "Is Obama spreading HIV in the Midwest? Up next, here on Fox News."

[Jester Messiah]

12. Oh gods, don't give them ideas.

Of course, you don't have to. I'm sure the first question they asked themselves is how they could pin it on the black guy.

[Vogon_Glory]

8. Of Course It Wasn't Supposed To Happen There

Of course it wasn't supposed to happen there. Ring-wing social theory holds that if you only teach abstinence-only sex Ed, shut down family planning clinics, and take the skin magazines out of the convenience stores, little boys and girls will remain chaste and pure until marriage (Even if most people can't really afford to marry until they're nearly 30), and diseases like HIV won't spread.

That's what the hapless citizens of Indiana get for letting their nit-job neighbors elect politicos who don't bother to deal with little bagatelles like inconvenient facts.

[phantom power]

10. Furthermore, I don't expect them to learn anything from it.

[Vogon_Glory]

13. All too flaming true, alas. N/t

[dixiegrrrrl]

9. This needs to be seen.....it is gonna be a growing problem in red states.

Rec.....


Edited to add:
Note this in article:
In December of 2009, President Barack Obama, backed by congressional Democrats, overturned the ban. ( on clean needle exchange)
And two years later, in 2011, House Republicans reinstated it.

[riversedge]

11. But they will ignore it.

[magical thyme]

14. needle exchange will address a symptom

but the grinding despair of poverty is what drives people to drug abuse to begin with.

The red states are certainly sowing what they have reaped with their self-imposed austerity.