Poverty, low education levels, & HIV/AIDS

"Hello, little schoolgirl," Johnson sang, "You better keep your dress tail down. I hear there's a lot of AIDS out here, and it's spreading all around."

When the song was released in 1991, many people still regarded HIV/AIDS as chiefly a problem of gay enclaves in big cities. But a new county-level map of U.S. HIV infection data, by researchers at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health, along with an analysis of the data by USA TODAY, shows how deeply in three decades HIV also has become entrenched in America's heartland, especially the South.

HIV is tightly entwined with poverty. Southern counties that have the greatest rates of HIV infection are among the poorest in the nation, USA TODAY's analysis shows. Elsewhere in the USA, counties with the highest rates of HIV-infected people had, on average, one in seven people living in poverty, earning roughly $22,350 for a family of four. In the South's most HIV-stricken counties, about one of every five people live below the federal poverty line.

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