Disease Network
A prevalent problem in today’s society is the HIV virus. Some of the issue stems from the actual virus itself but what I would like to talk about today is the prevalence in minority populations. In researching what I should write about for this blog post, I came across certain statistics that bothered me. In 2015: African Americans represented 12% of the population of the United States but made up 45% of HIV diagnoses for the year of 2015. Even further, hispanics/latinos make up 18% of our population but account for 24% of HIV diagnoses. In researching further into this topic of sexual transmitted diseases through networks, I came across an article about HIV positive migrants’ encounters with Swedish health care system.
This article essentially stated that migrants of Sweden benefit heavily from free testing and different resources provided to them for different sexually transmitted diseases when they immigrate into the country. Compared to America, where immigrants are afraid to go to hospitals and get checked for fear of being deported, the disease becomes rampant and becomes an issue for the nation. This article supports the idea of better health care and free access (for everyone) for certain treatments such as testing and protection so that certain diseases such as HIV do not become unmanageable. This keeps down the contraction rate and helps eradicate the disease from minorities and the under privileged population.
http://www.globalhealthaction.net/index.php/gha/article/view/31753