At the 2012 International AIDS Conference, Women With A Vision joined with SisteLove in Atlanta and our allies across the US deep South to demand significant government investment in the health and well-being of women living in the deep South.  Currently, women in the deep South are subjected to resource-poor health systems and do not have regular access to sexual and reproductive health care that addresses their needs.
Nearly 50% of individuals newly diagnosed with HIV infection reside in the Southern US, and the rate of diagnosis of HIV infection in the South is the highest of all the US regions.  The Southern epidemic is disproportionately affecting people of color, and particularly women of color.  71% of women diagnosed with HIV in the South were African American, according to a 2011 study by the Southern HIV/AIDS Strategy Initiative.
The International AIDS Conference brings attention to the AIDS epidemic in global South, and yet the US’s lack of investment in public health-informed domestic policy has created an HIV epidemic among women in the American deep South that is on par with those in countries like Botswana, Ethiopia, and Rwanda.
“While the HIV epidemic in the US has traditionally been tracked by individual risk behaviors, HIV vulnerability is far better measured by the structures and policies that make a woman have to choose between her daily survival and her long-term health,” says Shaquita Borden, Women With A Vision’s Director of Program Development and a PhD candidate in Public Health at University of Alabama at Birmingham.
“In New Orleans, we have witnessed how the criminalization of drug use and sex work further disconnects women from an already fractured safety net.  We’re fighting daily to make sure women in our communities have roofs over their heads and sufficient resources to feed their children.  Homelessness and poverty are two of the most critical human rights issues that fuel the AIDS epidemic.  HIV prevention interventions to address these structural issues aren’t even on the radar here,” explains Borden.
This situation is not unique to New Orleans.  In Atlanta, SisterLove’s Dazon Dixon Diallo has devoted decades of her life to transforming the structural environment in the South, where already vulnerable populations – the poor, women, transgendered people, the disenfranchised, and communities of color – are ever more at-risk because of lack of federal, state, and local investment.  “The Deep South is ‘ground zero for the domestic AIDS epidemic,’” Dixon Diallo explained.  “Without government intervention to address the conditions of systemic poverty, poor access to health care, gender violence, and over-incarceration in the Deep South, a world without AIDS will continue to be beyond our grasp.”