The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday released a report stating that four out of ten transgender women in seven major U.S. cities have HIV, which the agency says is a need for HIV prevention and treatment among to focus the demographics.
The study, conducted in 2019 and early 2020, found that 42 percent of 1608 transgender women in Atlanta, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle had a valid HIV test result.
The report, which the CDC described as one of the most comprehensive surveys of transgender women in the US, found that 62 percent of black transgender women and 35 percent of Hispanic or Latina transgender women had HIV. Meanwhile, 17 percent of white transgender women have the disease.
Nearly two-thirds of respondents reported living at or below the poverty level, and 17 percent had no health insurance. More than four in ten have experienced homelessness in the past year and 17 percent have been in jail.
The investigation was announced days before the National Transgender HIV Test Day on Sunday.
Demetre Daskalakis, the director of the CDC’s Division of HIV / AIDS Prevention, said in a release that reducing the number of transgender women with HIV in these cities would require ‘innovative and comprehensive status-neutral solutions’, involving ongoing engagement.
“These data provide a clear and compelling picture of the serious toll of HIV among transgender women and the social and economic factors – including systemic racism and transphobia – that are contributing to this unacceptable burden,” Daskalakis said.
The study found that 32 percent of respondents without HIV used pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a treatment for those at risk of HIV infection through sex or drug use. A total of 34 percent of participants said they were involved in sex work.
The CDC cited previous studies that concluded that many transgender women may not use PrEP for a variety of reasons, including medical mistrust, lack of transgender-including marketing, and concerns about how it will communicate with hormones. Sixty-seven percent of transgender women in the CDC survey reported using hormones for their sex reassignment.