World AIDS Day

From our friends at Center for American Progress:

On this World AIDS Day, as 33 million people worldwide live with HIV, we pause to recognize the magnitude of the HIV/AIDS crisis in our own country and to call for action commensurate with this domestic crisis. Here are a few facts:

* AIDS is the number one killer for black women between the ages of 25 and 34.

* A total of 56,300 people in the United States were newly infected with HIV in 2006, a number 40 percent higher than previously estimated.

* Fifty-three percent of new HIV infections in 2006 occurred in gay and bisexual men of all races and ethnicities.

As a new administration prepares to move to Washington, we urge them to be more than simply aware of the numbers. We want them to move quickly to address the U.S. epidemic.

We must continue the admirable work to fight HIV/AIDS around the world, but we must also seriously address the root causes of our own AIDS epidemic that allow the epidemic and the stigma attached to it—poverty, discrimination, violence, homophobia, and stark racial and gender inequities—to persist and grow here at home.

Read the whole factsheet here.

Tremendous progress has been made, but we must do more.