[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 16]
[House]
[Page 21593]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             WOMEN AND HIV

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton) is recognized 
for 5 minutes.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I rise to ask the House to reauthorize the 
Ryan White CARE Act, and I rise with special gratitude to the 
gentlewoman from the Virgin Islands (Mrs. Christensen), a physician and 
the leader of the Congressional Black Caucus on health care issues, who 
has alerted us to a very important date, and that is September 30 of 
this year when the CARE Act requires reauthorization or it will lapse. 
We just came to the floor because of just such a deadline to 
reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. I am asking the House to do 
the very same thing for the Ryan White CARE Act.
  Mr. Speaker, this is a bedeviling disease. In our country we 
initially saw it as a disease of segments of the population, and 
certainly in the beginning it was identified somehow as a gay disease. 
It took the infection of a young white man, a teenager, indeed, to wake 
America up to what this disease really means and how universal the 
disease is.
  We face the same issue, however, as the disease has moved so largely 
into the black and Latino communities. When a disease moves in that 
direction, it becomes too easy for a country with our history to 
identify it with the specific group that is most identified with the 
disease. Let us not make that mistake again.
  It is true that of the cases of AIDS diagnosed in the most recent 
period, 49 percent were African Americans and 20 percent were 
Hispanics. Those are the most alarming statistics I have read in a long 
time, considering that together blacks and Hispanics are not 20 percent 
of the population. African Americans are 42 percent of all of the 
people in the United States living with AIDS, and we are talking about 
people who are about 12 percent of the population.
  Behind these figures are very complicated reasons, and my time does 
not allow me to go into it; but the fact that these figures exist is 
enough to call us to this floor to reauthorize the Ryan White Act 
before September 30.
  African Americans have AIDS at almost 10 times the rate of whites. As 
with all diseases that tend to move toward the most disadvantaged in 
society, this disease is showing up in hugely disproportionate numbers 
among the very same disadvantaged groups that we associate with such 
figures, and I am particularly concerned that women are about 27 
percent of all new HIV infections.
  We can all remember when it was rare to find women of any color with 
HIV/AIDS. They represented only 8 percent of diagnosed AIDS patients in 
1985. Now we see that jump from 8 percent to 27 percent. Fifty-one 
percent of new HIV cases are among children, that is to say, people who 
are from 13 to 19 years of age. That is just unacceptable, Mr. Speaker.
  The movement of this disease downward into the population is the 
darkest aspect of the disease. Seventy-one percent of the women with 
this disease were infected through heterosexual conduct. That means 
that they probably had no idea that their partner was infected. This 
may be the chief reason that African American women are infected at a 
rate 25 times the rate for white women.
  Mr. Speaker, this disease, once wrongly thought of as a gay disease, 
must not now wrongly be thought of as a disease of certain ethnic or 
racial minorities. One way to make sure that we stop the spread of this 
disease is to reauthorize the Ryan White Act now when it is so 
desperately needed. We do not want to let this session end with our 
country looking like one of the Third World countries that is now 
caught in the grips of this disease. It is a preventable disease.
  If the Ryan White Act is reauthorized, we know what to do to contain 
this disease among blacks and Hispanics, just as we were successful in 
containing it among gays. Let us do it. Remember September 30. That is 
our deadline.

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