What Next - HIV’s Threat to Rural America
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 December 2019
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Two maps can help tell the story of a looming public health problem in rural America. One, published by the CDC, shows 220 of the most vulnerable counties in America either experiencing or at risk of an HIV outbreak. The other, published by the Washington Post, shows where pharmaceutical companies sent most of their pain pills at the height of the opioid crisis. These maps almost perfectly matchup. And in Cabell County, West Virginia, a place acutely affected by the opioid crisis, 80 new cases of HIV have been diagnosed since last year. Today on the show, what’s going on in West Virginia and what can be done to help?
Guests: A. Toni Young, AIDS activist and founder of the Community Education Group. Dr. Steven W. Thrasher, professor of journalism and LGBTQ health at Northwestern University. He recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Tony Young moved from Washington, D.C. to West Virginia, looking for a change. |
| 0:10.7 | It was like my weekend place. I actually moved out here thinking I was actually kind of getting out of HIV. |
| 0:18.7 | She'd been working as an HIV AIDS advocate, running an organization called the Community |
| 0:23.1 | Education Group. |
| 0:24.8 | She kept in touch with her public health contacts back in Washington. |
| 0:28.2 | And one day, she was on the phone with one of them, a woman named Karina. |
| 0:32.5 | And we were talking one day. |
| 0:35.6 | You know, I had been out here for, I don't know, like a month after kind of shutting down |
| 0:41.9 | most of my direct services in D.C. |
| 0:45.5 | And I was like, I don't know, you know, maybe I should do something out here. |
| 0:49.8 | And she's like, you're kidding, right? |
| 0:51.8 | And I was like, no, what do you mean? |
| 0:53.8 | And she's like, let me kidding, right? And I was like, no, what do you mean? And she's like, let me send you some stuff. |
| 0:58.5 | This is when Tony first saw the map. |
| 1:02.1 | I was literally sitting on my porch and my mouth fell open. |
| 1:05.4 | Why did it fall open? |
| 1:07.2 | It fell open because I didn't know that it was this bad. |
| 1:11.6 | Yeah. It fell open because I didn't know that it was this bad. |
| 1:17.6 | This map Tony was looking at. It had been released by the Centers for Disease Control. |
| 1:20.6 | It showed places the agency thought were most vulnerable to an HIV outbreak. |
| 1:25.6 | Not big cities, but rural counties, including more than half of the counties in West Virginia. |
| 1:33.2 | That's some pretty ridiculous math when you think about it. |
... |
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