Thinking of data that would correlate isn’t the easiest part of this assignment but, because in my high school (Hostos Lincoln Academy) the process was made easier. Everyday there was always a woman behind a Health First table; asking if you were I need of health insurance. Every time she would ask me I said ‘no’, and then I asked myself why is this woman here, doesn’t everyone have health insurance, “she’s just wasting her time!” But after doing a lot of research I realized that this isn’t true for everyone, that is why in my correlations  I focus on subjects that might affect the services of health care rendered to a patient or that can cause someone to not have health care at all.

            I believe that income has a lot to do with how much you know about diseases and how hard you try to prevent infection by these diseases. That is why I choose Median Family Income as one of my percentages to show the incidence of AIDS in certain communities in the Bronx. I expected that the zip codes with the lowest AIDS Rates to have the highest income in all of the Bronx, and for the zip codes with the highest AIDS rates to have some of the lowest incomes in all of the Bronx. I assumed that people with more tenure have better health insurance, because their jobs most likely provide them with it or that they would have enough money to pay for their own health related needs.  I also expected for the three zip codes with the highest AIDS rates to correlate in the negative correlation below. My expectation derived from personal experience, all the areas with high AIDS rates are surrounded by building owned by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), which are for people on Public Assistance and with low incomes. I was surprised that zip code 10464 having a higher income and also being one of the outliers of the correlation would have a higher AIDS rate of 1,424 per 100,000 than that of 10465 which is 757.6 per 100,000 and has one of  the lower AIDS incidence but a lower income tax. These points don’t reflect on the reason why I believed a community with a higher income would have a lower AIDS rates. Therefore those zip codes must be in an area where the population is mostly Caucasian and according to the U.S Census of 1999, during that time those zip codes where mainly populated by Caucasians (as you can see in Table 1)

Table 1:

            Public Assistance in an area like the Bronx where most of the population is below the poverty line will give positive results in a correlation. This is the reason why I chose to use Public Assistance to do my correlation, with this said,  I expected for the three zip codes with the highest AIDS rate to have the one of the highest percentages with public assistance. I thought that zip code 10456 and my own 10452 would correlate positively with and that zip code 10471 with an AIDS rate of only 341.7 per 100,000 would be an outlier. The reasons for these assumptions are that the areas of 10451, 10452, 10456, 10457, and many more part of the southwestern side of the Bronx are mainly NYCHA buildings and in such places the amount of people on public assistant increases dramatically and so do many more factors that contribute to high AIDS rates like drug use and gang violence. Therefore, as the average of people of Public Assistance increases in the Bronx so does the incidence of AIDS in a certain area. For example in 10454 which isn’t the highest AIDS rate in the Bronx but is one of the top three the amount of residents on public assistance is the highest for the Bronx.

            When going to a health care facility not many of the doctors speak Spanish, this language barrier can cause miscommunication between a doctor and his/her patient, and ultimately these patients won’t receive the right type of attention. That is why I decided to look at the population in the Bronx that doesn’t speak any English.  I expected the correlations to be positive in that as the AIDS rates increased the amount of non- English speakers will increase. I also expected for the zip codes with lower AIDS rates to have lower a minority of non- English speakers. I made these speculations, based on my previous research on People Living with AIDS (PLWA), which showed that the majority group infected with AIDS was the Hispanic male population for most of the zip codes. I wasn’t surprised to see that most of the zip codes with the lowest AIDS rates in the Bronx were at the bottom of the scatter plot showing how either most of their population are English speakers or that they barely have non-English speakers in their area.  I was a bit surprised thought that 10456 which has the highest AIDS rates in the Bronx was a bit lower than the rest of the higher rates in the Bronx, I had expected this area to be populated by many non-English speakers.

            As a Hispanic female who lives in the Bronx, I was interested in seeing how bad AIDS is affecting our Hispanic male population in the Bronx by zip code. Consequently, I decided to find the correlation of the Hispanic male population in the Bronx, and sadly the results did not surprise me. I was expecting for the southwestern zip codes to have the highest AIDS incidence in the Bronx, because that is where most Hispanics live, also because when analyzing the table for People Living with AIDS the Hispanic male population had one of the highest counts for the three categories. The results that I got back showed me what I had expected to see, according to the correlation, as the Hispanic male population increased do did the AIDS rate for zip codes such as 10457 and 10456 which are at the tip of the correlation on parallel sides of the trend line. This abnormality might again be due to the lack of health care available to these men, you must also take into consideration the fact that some of these men might be immigrants and therefore they don’t have health care. Another reason may be that these men might have arrived to the Bronx from another country and when diagnosed with the disease they were living in the Bronx.

            In conclusion, most of the highest AIDS rates in the Bronx focus in a group of zip codes towards the Southwestern side of the Bronx. This concentration is due to the fact that in this area of the Bronx has a large population of low income and also that these areas contain a lot of New York City Housing Authority buildings (NYCHA) which are also known as the projects. The crime and drug activity in these areas are large, just this week on July 18^th, 2007, there was a shootout in a local grocery store on 165 and Summit Avenue Bronx, N.Y. 10452 (I was informed of this by my younger sister who was there).