A Little Scarier Than Cholesterol Or Even Syphilis

Just saying is all:

At this moment, one in four gay men in New York City is infected with HIV, an incurable disease that has infected more than 100,000 men in New York City, 20,000 of whom have no idea they have even been infected.

In the last six years, new diagnoses of the disease among gay men in New York City under the age of 30 rose by 33 percent.

Among gay males between the ages of 13 and 19, the rate of infection has doubled.

The disease has spread across the nation — where government estimates put the total currently diagnosed at over one million — but nowhere has it taken hold more than in New York, where its incidence is four times the national average, with more cases than Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Washington, D.C., combined. In Manhattan, the incidence of the disease among gay men has more than doubled since 2001.

. . .

Indeed, the facts that appear in the first three paragraphs of this article — stunning developments worthy of the attention of every breathing New Yorker — were reported in only a single paragraph buried in the metro section of the September 12, 2007, New York Times.

“Yes, people have forgotten,” said Sara Markt, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Health, which put out the report on September 11. She sounded surprised that the statistics didn’t attract the attention they should have, given the alarming growth of HIV among young, gay New Yorkers — precisely the group that first faced the alarming threat of AIDS in the early 1980s.

Now, more than a quarter century later, the eyes of a concerned world focus almost exclusively elsewhere when HIV and AIDS are mentioned. The epidemic in Africa has, by some estimates, cost 25 million lives, with millions more likely to die over the next several years.

But in New York City — where aggressive drug treatments have slowed the death rate from AIDS to a trickle, and heightened protections have reduced the number of infections caused by needles, or passed from mother to child — a different sort of crisis has emerged. While few die from a diagnosis of HIV, many thousands of New Yorkers who engage in unprotected gay sex find themselves living with the painful consequences, a catastrophic illness that they mistakenly believed had passed them by. Their lives are still forever transformed by a disease that rarely finds itself in the pages of The New York Times — except in coverage of pharmaceutical developments — or discussed openly by public officials outside the halls of the city’s impassioned health department. “We’re headed in the wrong direction,” declared Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, in his September 11 announcement. “Unless young men reduce the number of partners they have, and protect themselves and their partners by using condoms more consistently, we will face another wave of suffering and death from HIV and AIDS.”