I’m intimately familiar with the challenges we face in successfully mobilizing this population around health care. But at 30, I am still part (barely) of the so-called “young invincibles,” which received so much attention throughout the ACA enrollment process. I aged out of the youth category several years ago. And each month, another 1,000 young people are infected, with over 76,400 currently living with HIV across the country. Today, one in four new HIV infections in the U.S. While today’s youth have never known a world without HIV, many also never experienced the terrifying reality of the epidemic before the advent of highly active anti-retrovirals (HAART) in the mid-90s.
Today we mark the third annual National Youth HIV/AIDS Awareness Day (NYHAAD), an opportunity to raise awareness of and take action against the devastating impact that this epidemic continues to take on our young people.
