BASUAHTeens

March 10 is National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, a day to recognize the special risks HIV/AIDS poses for women and girls, and to raise awareness of the disease's increasing impact on them. In 2010, 18 percent of diagnoses of HIV infection in Illinois were among women and girls aged 13 years and older. Additionally, almost 7,100 women and adolescent girls were living with HIV at the end of 2010. More than 3,300 women and girls with AIDS have died since the epidemic began. Women and girls of color—especially black women and girls—bear a disproportionately heavy burden of HIV infection. In 2010, for adult and adolescent females, the rate of diagnoses of HIV infection for black females was nearly 21 times as high as the rate for white females and approximately 6 times as high as the rate for Hispanic/Latino females. The reason women of color are more severely burdened by HIV and AIDS are not directly related to race or ethnicity, but rather to some of the barriers faced by many in these communities across the country. Source: Illinois Department of Public Health, HIV/AIDS Surveillance Unit, December 2011