It seemed I thought the problem was worse than is actually was. It wasn’t as if there were articles in the paper everyday regarding AIDS in the community of Syracuse and Onondaga County as a whole. However, when there was, they seemed to make the front page, including a bold heading along with the four deadly letters “AIDS”. A recent article from August 9 in the Post Standard, entitled “Grant to Fund AIDS outreach”, stated how “The per capita rate of blacks living with HIV/AIDS in the entire region is 709 cases per 100,000. For ZIP code 13204… the rate for blacks was…at 1,557 per 100,000.” This rate seems extremely high, and supports my estimation of 87% of cumulative AIDS cases in Onondaga County being black, when really the figure is only 35.23%. Furthermore, the article mentions: “…especially women infected by their male partners, have the fastest growing rates of HIV infection… in the entire 11-county region. (1)” Once again, my prediction of 43% of cumulative AIDS cases in Onondaga County being female nearly doubled the actual percent of 22.7%. In comparison to the U.S. AIDS rate of 328, Onondaga County has a total rate of 118. However, this number is deceiving because a majority of the area, over 50%, is rural. When looking at the urban setting in Onondaga County, specifically Syracuse, the AIDS rate differs vastly. In zip code 13202, downtown Syracuse, the cumulative AIDS rate is 1,472. With regards to the newspaper article and HIV, there are currently 46 HIV positive individuals living in zip code 13204, which also has a cumulative AIDS rate of 605. Apparently, while the coverage in the Syracuse area of this deadly virus was pretty minimal, when there was coverage, the problem seemed much worse than it actually was. In fact, since 1980, there have only been 1,100 AIDS cases in Onondaga County, even including those in Syracuse, a city having a total metropolitan population of 732,117 (2).
Syracuse Picture Taken From:
web.syr.edu/~mavaleri/