AIDS in the Bible Belt

PBS:

Why the Deep South is ground zero for the domestic AIDS epidemic.

I zigzagged 4,000 miles across the Deep South on a road trip this summer and fall.

After a jazz-filled weekend in New Orleans, I drove north into the “deep deep” of Louisiana, then crossed the great, flat floodplains of the Mississippi River under the expansive blue sky. I passed through catfish country, raked across the cotton kingdom and marched back in time through the Civil Rights era. I unintentionally visited a few towns named “Greenville,” rambled up Walker Evans’ Depression Era trail and drove the historic route that thousands walked, from Selma to Montgomery.

I came all this way to understand several startling statistics about the home of the Bible Belt, the Black Belt (known for its black soil) and the Stroke Belt (known for high incidences of strokes and cardiovascular disease). My mission was to investigate why the American South has HIV infection rates nearly 50 percent higher than the rest of the country, and why almost half of the people in the U.S. living with HIV — and dying of AIDS — reside in the South.

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