Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City.

Our goal is to bring

scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews

with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more.

If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, our topic is the ongoing HIV epidemic among women, particularly black women in the

American South. My guest is Dr. Tierra Willie, a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

whose work focuses on a specific challenge, HIV prevention among women in abusive relationships.

Let's listen.

Dr. Tierra Willie, thank you so much for coming to the podcast to talk about the HIV epidemic

and women.

Tell me this story about the challenge of HIV and women, the United States, 2021.

Yes, thank you for this opportunity.

So for the past four decades, black women in particular have been disproportionately affected by HIV.

So what do we mean when we say that is that black women actually represent the majority of HIV

infections among women.

And infections among women are not a rounding error. They're pretty significant number of

infections in the United States. Yes, yes, they are. About one in every five individuals are women

who are infected. And is there a geographic area where we're seeing infections among women and

particularly black women? Absolutely. So we see that there are kind of like geographic hot spots of HIV infection, in particular in the deep south. What are the most common ways for women to become infected with HIV? So surprisingly, over 80% of HIV infections among women are due to heterosexual sex.

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