HIV/AIDS Rate in Washington D.C. Tops West Africa

By: Jackie Jones

Get tested. Know your status and be tested regularly.

That’s the message health experts in Washington, D.C. want to get across, following a report released in last month that revealed at least 3 percent of the city’s residents have HIV or AIDS, a total that exceeds the 1 percent threshold that constitutes an epidemic.

With 2,984 residents per every 100,000 over the age of 12 - or 15,120, according to the 2008 epidemiology report by the District's HIV/AIDS office – that means the city’s rate of HIV/AIDS infection is higher than West Africa’s.

“We think information is power, and every time we release information, we do capture another level of the population who recognize HIV is important to their lives,” said Shannon Hader, M.D., director of D.C.’s HIV-AIDS Administration.

Hader told BlackAmericaWeb.com all but one of the city’s eight wards saw an increase in the transmission of the AIDS virus, meaning it cuts across all racial, socio-economic and gender orientation groups.

The report, she said, caused many people to ask, “What’s the first step I can do to protect my health and move the health of the city forward?”

Hader said many Americans have relaxed because they either think they are not at risk for the disease or that their health care professionals are routinely testing them for HIV/AIDS. Many doctors think they will catch the patients at greatest risk simply by asking them about their sexual history and activity. An HIV/AIDS screening should be as routine as having one’s blood pressure checked. Sexual history should not matter, she said.

“It doesn’t take a lot of partners to be at risk,” she said. “You could have had only one partner, and you didn’t know his HIV status. This is such a common disease that you can’t categorize risk.”

In the African-American community particularly, many straight black men believe that AIDS is still largely a gay white man’s disease, and while the report said that only three in 10 people surveyed said they used condoms, “anecdotally, I would tell you that the number is lower among African-Americans,” said Regina Newkirk, director of development communications and community relations for the Whitman-Walker Clinic.

HIV/AIDS Rate in Washington D.C. Tops West Africa....

Reports of Discord Over King Memorial Statue’s Design Exaggerated, Officials Maintain

By: Jackie Jones, BlackAmericaWeb.com

News reports that the all-important U.S. Commission of Fine Arts had attacked the statue portion of the already approved Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Washington, D.C. exaggerated what was actually a part of the normal building process, according to the president and CEO of the memorial foundation and an official with the Fine Arts Commission.

“It gets into how you depict somebody and how do you do it,” said Thomas Luebke, secretary of the commission, which advises the government on public design and aesthetics on monuments and memorials in the nation’s capital. Commission members are “looking for the very best artistic rendition as they can,” he said.

FULL STORY....

H.S. TRACK STAR DISQUALIFIED OVER MUSLIM UNIFORM

A high school track star in Washington D.C. was disqualified from an annual meet because officials said the custom-made outfit she wears to conform to her Muslim faith violated competition rules, reports the Associated Press.

Juashaunna Kelly, a senior at Theodore Roosevelt High School, holds the city record in the mile and two-mile among girls. Although Kelly was wearing the same uniform she has worn for the past three seasons at the annual Montgomery Invitational indoor track and field meet in Landover, MD, officials for some reason disqualified her from last Saturday's event.

The custom-made, one-piece blue and orange unitard covers her head, arms, torso and legs. Over the unitard, she wears the same orange and blue T-shirt and shorts as her teammates. The outfit allows her to compete while adhering to her Muslim faith, which forbids displaying any skin other than her face and hands.

"It's not special," Kelly told the AP. "It doesn't make me perform better."

But meet director Tom Rogers said Kelly's uniform violated rules of the National Federation of State High School Associations, which sanctioned the event. Uniforms are required to be "a single-solid color and unadorned, except for a single school name or insignia no more than 2 1/4 inches," he said.

Rogers said he knew Kelly was wearing the uniform for religious reasons and that he offered her several options to conform to the rules while still respecting her faith, including placing a plain T-shirt over her unitard and then wearing her team uniform over it.

However, Kelly's mother, Sarah, and Roosevelt Coach Tony Bowden disputed that account. They said officials made several demands of her daughter before Rogers made his decision.

"First, they said she had to take her hood off," Sarah Kelly said. "Then, they said she can't have anything with logos displayed. Then, they said she had to turn it inside out. When I told them that there weren't any logos on it, they said she had to put a plain white T-shirt on over it."

When asked to explain how Kelly was able to wear the same uniform for three years without any problems, including at last year's Montgomery Invitational, Rogers said officials must have missed the uniform last year.

"It wasn't a problem last year, and it's a problem this year? Make me understand why," Bowden said.

Kelly, whose 1,600 time of 5 minutes 17.49 seconds and 3,200 time of 12:00.81 are the fastest of any D.C. girl, was hoping to run a time fast enough at the Montgomery Invitational to qualify for the New Balance Collegiate Invitational in New York on Feb. 8-9. Bowden said the team has no other meets scheduled that would allow her to qualify for the event, which attracts dozens of college recruiters.