Latino Men in the Southeast Are Late Entrants to HIV Care

Now that early diagnosis and treatment is becoming a mantra of HIV care, researchers are probing the causes behind unusually long delays. Several studies from around the U.S. have suggested that Hispanic/Latino patients present for care later in the course of infection than other racial/ethnic groups. In the latest such study, researchers evaluated data from 850 patients who presented to a single large AIDS clinic in North Carolina between 1999 and 2009; 61% were black, 28% white, and 11% Latino.

Latino patients were significantly younger than the other patients but presented at a later stage of disease, as judged by both median CD4 count (186 cells/mm³ vs. 292 cells/mm³ for whites and 302 cells/mm³ for blacks) and the proportion with AIDS-d…