Number of Hispanic women with HIV grows

By Louie Gilot
El Paso Times
Article Launched:03/13/2007 12:00:00 AM MDT

As the region's largest HIV-AIDS clinic, La Fe CARE Center, prepares to open this week with expanded services, local experts say they continue to see trends in the way the deadly disease is spread - even decades after it became known.

For instance, there have been more men and women older than 55 - those re-entering the dating scene after a divorce or the death of a spouse - testing positive for the virus. But the fastest-growing number of infections by far occur in young, heterosexual Hispanic women.

One such patient who asked not to be named said she was infected by her first husband when she lived in Juárez 12 years ago.

"All I knew about AIDS was that it was the gays and the prostitutes and people who were promiscuous who got it. I never thought that someone like me - a housewife, who'd been only with her husband - could get it," said the 41-year-old woman who now lives in El Paso.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that for every diagnosed HIV/AIDS case nationwide, there are three to five undiagnosed ones.

The growth in HIV rates among Hispanic women is a nationwide trend.

"Latinas are historically sexually-uneducated and they are brought up to be submissive to their male partners. So when they are being put at risk by a partner who has been cheating with other women or with men, she doesn't feel empowered to say, Put on a condom,' or Where were you last night?' " said Estela Reyes, the La Fe spokeswoman.