During one of our first classes for this course, Professor Yoshino wrote a few questions, on a closed envelope, for us to answer. My questions included the cumulative AIDS cases for my zip code; the percentage of cumulative female AIDS cases; the percentage of cumulative black AIDS cases. My initial guess for the cumulative AIDS cases in my zip code, 63115, was 2,500 but I quickly scratched out that response realizing that I had misread the question and based my answer on what I thought the total was for the entire St. Louis. My real guess was 500 cumulative AIDS cases in my zip code. The actual number of cumulative AIDS cases was 195. I completely over guessed the number of cases by 305 cases. The question here is, why did I guess this? I believe it is because in my zip code, poverty is an issue with the income being extremely low at, $24,587. This is below the median annual household income for the US, $46,326 (Refer to table 6), Missouri, $43, 988 and the entire St. Louis region, $35,846. As far as the percentage of cumulative female AIDS cases, I guessed 62%. I only guessed this because I felt that the population of females in St. Louis was greater than that of men and that the disease is no longer consider a “gay” disease, but I was wrong. It is still prominent in the gay community (Refer to Table 5). Females only comprise 13% of all AIDS cases. The disease is still considered a “gay” disease and it is mainly because of how sexually active gay people are which puts them at a higher risk for contracting the disease. With that, I also searched for the gay communities in St. Louis because I had a perception that the gay communities would host the greatest number of cumulative AIDS cases of the St. Louis region. Actually, I guessed correctly because the gay community is located in the area code 63108 where there are 355 (9%) cumulative AIDS cases (Refer to Table 1). Finally to answer my last question, of the cumulative AIDS cases only 52%* of them were black, not the 89% that guessed, which shows that that this is a major issue amongst the black community. I guessed this high because many blacks in St. Louis are uneducated with low incomes and I figured that they are more susceptible to diseases because they are not educated about them. I think that this information is astounding mainly because the black population[1] is so low. There are 329,433 blacks but 601,499 whites (Refer to table 2). Certainly, I expected the whites to have more cumulative AIDS cases mainly because their population almost doubled that of blacks.

As I mentioned earlier, Professor Yoshino gave us a folder with pertinent information in it about AIDS in our communities. As I viewed the information that was given to me, I began to question much of it. For instance, I found it very peculiar that the zip code of 63114, a fairly lower middle-income area only had 8 AIDS cases according to this information. After finding so many discrepancies in the information that I was given, I conducted my own investigation. I found an HIV/AIDS Surveillance Newsletter distributed by the Metropolitan St. Louis AIDS program under the City of St. Louis Department of Health, Divison of Communicable Diseases (6). I found that in the zip code, 63114, there were 80 cumulative AIDS cases. In addition, after noticing that several crucial zip codes were missing from the information from Yoshino, I decided to use the information given by the surveillance newsletter that I discovered. Since many of the zip codes in the St. Louis area were not listed by Yoshino’s information, I added them to my research. One of the major problems that I found was determining which zip codes were apart of the city or the county. In St. Louis, many zip codes have areas in both the city and the county, such as 63105, so I decided to do all of them whose classification was merely St. Louis including the city and much of the county. This proved difficult with some of my topics that relied on city or county analysis and did not provide clear data for certain topics in each zip code, such as cumulative aids cases by race.

Perhaps the most shocking statistic was the rate per 100,000. In St. Louis, the rate per 100,000 was 411 while the state rate was 190 and the national rate was 340. With this, AIDS is a huge issue in St. Louis because the rate per 100,000 surpassed the national rate by 71 (3 and Refer to table 4). Since it is such an issue here, the media coverage about it should be enormous. This leads to the role of the media in educating the public on the AIDS epidemic.