Rural Communities Struggle With AIDS
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
COMBINATION therapy with protease inhibitors and changing demographics of the AIDS epidemic have cast a spotlight on rural health care professionals' abilities to keep pace with the disease.
For example, in some rural areas of Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, women make up one fourth of cumulative reported AIDS cases, well beyond the national figure of 15%. Yet, in those rural areas, few efforts are aimed at providing women with education about the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or testing to detect HIV infection.
In some rural California counties, nearly one fifth of physicians participating in a new study have never seen a patient with HIV, yet optimal patient outcomes have been linked with care from physicians experienced in treating HIV disease.
"There has been a dramatic increase in the number of HIV patients in rural areas," said Petra Liljestrand, PhD, of the Community Provider AIDS Training Project at San Francisco …
