Filed under: Sexual Health, HIV/AIDS
As the Chief Executive Officer of The Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), the nation's oldest AIDS service organization, Dr. Marjorie Hill is no stranger to the true impact HIV has on those who are infected and the family and friends who are also affected by it.
She has watched the face of those seeking assistance from the myriad of prevention and health care programs GMHC offers, go from predominately white, male and gay to black, female, and heterosexual.
That every 9 1/2 minutes someone is infected with the disease in the U.S. and more than 50 percent of those newly infected are of African descent, should make awareness, testing and prevention efforts the top of everyone's agenda every day; every minute.
In honor of World AIDS Day, the global initiative originally conceived in 1988 to bring more awareness to this devasting disease that ravishes communities, countries and continents, Dr. Hill shares exclusively with Blackvoices.com her personal message about sex, stigma and shame and why those three words are just as potentially deadly to the African- American community as H.I.V.