Map shows HIV rate highest in South

• By STEVEN WARD AND MIKE STOBBE
• Advocate and AP writers
• Published: Jun 23, 2009 - Page: 4B

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A new online atlas launched Monday that highlights the areas of the country with the highest rates of HIV and AIDS shows East Baton Rouge, West Feliciana, East Feliciana and Iberville parishes are hot spots for the disease in Louisiana.

The HIV/AIDS Atlas, created by the nonprofit organization The National Minority Quality Forum, also shows Orleans and Allen parishes as other areas in the state hard-hit by HIV and AIDS, said Becky Fleischauer, a spokeswoman for the forum.

The new Internet data map finds the infection rates tend to be highest in the South.

Beth Scalco, the Louisiana AIDS director of the HIV/AIDS Program for the Office of Public Health, said the six Louisiana parishes highlighted in the map are six of 72 counties in the country with the highest rate of people living with HIV or AIDS.

Scalco said East Baton Rouge and Orleans rate high because of population and large urban areas.

Even though the other four parishes are rural areas, they rate high because of the number of correctional facilities in each parish. Numbers of HIV and AIDS cases are usually high in prisons, Scalco said.

The highest numbers of HIV cases are in population centers like New York and California. However, many of the areas with the highest rates of HIV — that is, the highest proportion of people with the AIDS-causing virus — are in the South, according to the data map, which has information for more than 90 percent of the nation’s counties and Washington, D.C.

HIV infection rates are higher in African-American communities, and high minority populations in the South help explain the finding. While that’s not surprising, the high rates seen throughout states like Georgia and South Carolina were, said Gary Puckrein, president of the National Minority Quality Forum, the nonprofit research organization that put the map together.

Of 48 counties with the highest prevalence rates for HIV that had not yet progressed to AIDS, 25 were in Georgia, according to the map. Those were counties in which more than 0.7 percent of the population was infected with HIV.

Georgia, Florida, South Carolina and Virginia were heavily represented on another map of counties, which showed the highest prevalence rates for cases that had progressed to AIDS.

The map depicts reported numbers of people living with HIV and AIDS in 2006. Puckrein said the data came from state health departments and was checked against information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Different states report data in different ways, and there may be case duplication that could impact some of the findings, Puckrein said.

The CDC’s HIV and AIDS prevalence data is reported on a state level, not by county. CDC officials were cautious about the data map, saying they hadn’t seen all the organization’s information.