Ten O'Clock News

[Man on street 1] Scared to death. Scared to death [Woman on street 1] I really couldn't say if it's stronger on the white end or if it is on the Black-- [Man on street 2] There have been no Black stars that have died from this. But my fears are that if we concentrated on AIDS in the Black community it may provide an unwelcome and an unwarranted stigma. Reporter] Scientifically AIDS knows no color. But in the United States the color of its victims is disproportionately Black. There are more than 24,000 Americans with AIDS right now, 25 percent of them are Black. That despite the fact that Blacks represent only 12 percent of the American population. And if color counts, so does sex. While most male AIDS victims are white, a majority of its female victims are Black or Hispanic. According to the Center for Disease Control, Black women are 13 times more likely to get AIDS as white women. Hispanic women are 11 times as likely to get the disease. And because these women are more vulnerable, so are their children. Eighty two percent of infants with AIDS are Black. Add Hispanics and other minority groups, and you find that 91 percent of babies born with

AIDS are found in communities of color. [Denise Cartier-Bennia] This is a disease of whole Black families with mothers and fathers infecting their offspring and watching them die. [Reporter] Part of the reason why minorities are suffering more than their share of the disease is that the mode of transmission for AIDS is different in Black and white communities. Among homosexual, bisexual AIDS patients 73 percent are white, while only 16 percent are Black and 11 percent Hispanic. But among heterosexual AIDS patients 50 percent are Black and 25 percent Hispanic. That's three quarters of the heterosexual AIDS cases. Whites represent only a quarter of these heterosexual AIDS victims. According to Law Professor Denise Cartier-Bennia, there are several factors contributing to the higher rate of AIDS within the Black community. First, the use of I.V. drugs. According to the Center for Disease Control, Black women are five times more likely to get AIDS from sexual contact with a drug user as

from sex with a bisexual man. But drugs alone aren't the only reason AIDS is infecting more minorities. The integration of immigrants from Haiti and Africa into the Black American community, for example, may be escalating the problem. And there are also a myriad of social and economic reasons. Another indication of how AIDS virus has been spread within the Black community is military recruiting. Most of these recruits don't acknowledge any prior use of drugs and yet the federal government found that while slightly less than 1 percent in every thousand white recruits tested positive for the AIDS antibody, almost four in every thousand Black recruits tested positive. [Cartier-Bennia] If one is to assume that these young Black and other racial or ethnic people were from the general population, that almost one out of every 250 examined was infected with HIV and that 10-30 percent of the will eventually develop AIDS in Black America.

It's an extremely precarious position. [Reporter] Despite these alarming statistics it's important to emphasize that AIDS is not a Black disease. Blacks have no more a predisposition for AIDS than whites do. It's not race that creates a risk. It's behaviors. [Cartier-Bennia] It is the product of engaging in risky behavior that leads to AIDS. With respect to the Black community, knowledge may be the best if not the only effective weapon against AIDS. We must share some of the blame within our own community as well because Black and Hispanic politicians also have been woefully silent on the issues of AIDS and the minority community. As well as the Black church which finds itself, much like the Moral Majority, between a rock and a hard place. [Reporter] But even those who are aware of the risk say it's often hard to discuss it within the Black community. [Cartier-Bennia] This is just literally another piece of baggage that has

been placed I think disproportionately on the backs of young Black children in our society today. But we've got to deal with it, I mean I want to make sure those young Black children are going to get to be as old as I am. This is a message that if it's to be effective and to work, has got to be delivered from minority people to other minority people, saying "this is our problem, this is our crisis, this is our community that may very well not be here by the year 2000." [Reporter] For the 10 O'Clock News, I'm Meg Vaillancourt.