Half of Gay Black Men Are Projected to Get HIV

February 23, 2016 — 12:00 PM EST

If you’re a white American woman, your risk of being diagnosed with HIV is pretty small, lower than the odds of dying in a car crash. If you’re a gay black man, the chances of getting an HIV diagnosis are closer to a coin flip.

About 43 percent of black men who have sex with men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetimes if the epidemic’s current trends hold, according to research being presented on Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control. For Hispanic men who have sex with men, the rate is 22 percent. For white men who have sex with men, it’s about 10 percent.

The latest report is a staggering reminder that gay men of color bear the brunt of the HIV crisis. That fact has been evident for years in the data on HIV, but it has often gone unmentioned as public health campaigns focus on broad-based prevention strategies.

“You see this community that is at far higher risk for HIV infection, but there almost seems to be a concerted effort not to talk about it,” said Greg Millett, vice president and director of Public Policy at AmfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. Millett, who wasn’t involved in the research, worked at the CDC until 2014 and helped craft President Obama’s National HIV/AIDS Strategy.

Here’s a look at the lifetime risk of getting HIV for different demographic groups, according to CDC data being presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-23/gay-black-men-are-still-bearing-the-brunt-of-the-hiv-crisis