By Don Flynn
NEW YORK—HIV-infected black men are unintentionally fostering an “environmental genocide” in the African American community that threatens “a catastrophe,” HIV/AIDS expert and former presidential advisor Beny Primm told The Spiritual Herald.
“Unless we do something, and something that is sustained for the domestic problem that this creates, we are in for deaths among African Americans from ages of 22-44 that are astronomical,” he warned.

Primm, M.D., executive director of the Addiction Research and Treatment Corporation and former White House expert for Nixon and Bush, warned that the black community is “in a terrible situation” and called for a presidential emergency plan for AIDS research like that going on in Africa.
“The billions of dollars that have been spent in about 13 or 14 foreign nations or developing countries to help them is what we need here in the United States.”
The anti-HIV pioneer described a set of “social determinants” such as poverty, massive 20-percent unemployment, lack of health treatment, inadequate educational programs and a culture of prison stays resulting in black HIV-infection rates more than three times that of whites and double that of Hispanics.
“Those numbers, public health-wise would, in the white community, be such a catastrophe that one would be calling this a national health emergency,” he said.
“I don’t want to forget about the Native American communities, but we do not have a handle on the numbers there.”
A culture of revolving prison stays among black men along with lack of treatment and jobs are at the core of the emergency, he said.
“Let’s talk about black men,” said Primm, himself an African American physician.
“Black men have a responsibility because it is they who are driving this.

"It’s black men. It is genocidal because of what we are practicing and we don’t even know it,” Primm declared. “You’re not even aware that that’s what it’s doing, but that’s what is happening.

“It is men, period, that give HIV to women. Now women may give it to men, but it’s far, far less likely than it is for men to give it to women who are then infected.”
The black male carriers and infectors, he said, “are not necessarily on the down-low. It may be unintentional. It may be because they’re in jail.”
CDC studies have shown that many prisoners are not screened or tested for HIV upon entering prison or more critically upon release and carry the disease back into their communities.
And in the men-only confines behind bars, “black men may have sex with men and get infected.

“That’s not necessarily their sexual orientation, because it’s a protective kind of relationship, so that they can survive that ordeal of being in jail and being taken advantage of,” Primm continued.
“They may come out and they may not be continuing their antiretroviral viral medication.
As a consequence, they are infectious and are infecting the women.

“There are 10 black women for every seven black men. And three of those black men are in jail.
"Two may be gay, so that means 10 women for every two black American men,” he added.
HIV spreads through the prison population and then to the communities.
“Many people do not get treatment until it’s very late and they have walked around being highly infectious," he said.
“At that point, their viral load has multiplied within them, and they continue to have unprotected sex, and so they’re infecting many, many others.”
Primm called for a massive, culturally competent education program, “particularly in the African American community.Culturally the advice and the education has to be catered to that community.

“We can’t just extrapolate from what was used in the gay white world in terms of prevention and education, and directly apply that to the African American community.
“A cultural competence initiative is more receptive by the African American community when it comes from the African American church or from African American physicians like myself.
“It does not have to always be, but they tend to have a greater belief in what we’re saying instead of blaming the federal government for their problem, or blaming the federal government for inventing HIV to kill us as a people.
We need that kind of credibility in the provider of the education.”
Such a program would have to be “more than a Marshall Plan,” Primm explained.
“What we’re talking about is a concentrated effort that starts at the level of the President of the United States and filters down to the Department of Health and Human Services, to every department of HHS that deals with health, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
He urged that even the criminal justice system be included “because we need testing of people going into prison and coming out of prison. Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons all have to be involved.
“They come back to the community because they can’t get a job, they don’t have health insurance, they don’t get Medicaid, so they can’t get their medication.”