HIV Testing Day Should Be Treated Like a Holiday

While today marks the 19th annual HIV/AIDS testing day, a number of women are completely in the dark about  the movement to increase testing for this disease. Furthermore, ignorance about the importance of testing could be particularly damning for black women considering the odds that are stacked against us.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the virus is the third leading cause of death among black women ages 35 to 44 years old. If that’s not scary enough, we’re said to account for 30 percent of the estimated new HIV infections among all blacks and 85 percent of the women with the virus acquired it through a heterosexual sexual encounter. Additionally, the estimated rate of new HIV infections for black women was more than 15 times the rate for white women, and more than three times as high as that of Latinas.

With that statistics like that in mind, we cannot afford to be lackadaisical about this important subject.

Protect yourself ladies, here are five ways to partake in this national HIV/AIDS testing day “holiday.” –danielle canada