Journal of Addiction Research & Therapy
Open Access

Research Article

AIDS in Black America: A Study of the City of Chicago

Department of Social Work and Human Services, Lewis University, Romeoville, Illinois, USA

*Corresponding Author:

Dr. Arthur Horton
Department of Social Work and Human Services
Lewis University, Romeoville, Illinois 60446-2200, USA
E-mail: hortonar@lewisu.edu

Received March 19, 2013; Accepted April 28, 2013; Published May 22, 2013

Citation: Horton A (2013) AIDS in Black America: A Study of the City of Chicago. J Addict Res Ther 4:148. doi:10.4172/2155-6105.1000148

Copyright: © 2013 Horton A. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

There is an epidemic of HIV/AIDS in African American women in United States, and it is devastating black communities. There is a disproportionate outbreak among black women and adolescents; they are especially at risk these days. They are being infected through unprotected sexual intercourse, drug use and babies being born with AIDS because the mother is infected. Because such a large proportion of black females who carry the disease live in poverty, there is minimal health care, either as prevention or maintenance of victims of the virus. This study examines a possible success story in coping with the epidemic as found in the dramatic decrease of the HIV/ AIDS death rates for the city of Chicago. It considers the effects of educational achievement of blacks in relation to the decline in HIV related deaths over a decade in Chicago. Some of the results are surprising and not as hypothesized, for example increases in education did not uniformly lead to a decrease in AID cases. The impact of HIV/AID regarding black females was as hypothesized. The number of cases increased over the decade and at a statistically significant level.

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