LENORE SKENAZY AIDS among black women an epidemic

Okay, here's the one national security question I would have asked at the presidential debate, given the chance. Actually, Gwen Ifill already asked it in the vice presidential debate. But since both candidates completely ducked, here goes:
What do you propose to do about the fact that black women are 13 times more likely to die of AIDS than their white counterparts?
Whoa! Who brings up black women in a big-time debate? That, unfortunately, is exactly what it looked like the candidates were thinking as Vice President Dick Cheney harrumphed that he was "not aware that it was that severe an epidemic" and John Edwards switched topics.
But when we talk about AIDS in America, we are talking about national security. This year alone, 40,000 Americans will become infected with HIV. Of these, 50 percent will be black. And, increasingly, those blacks will be women -- most of them poor.
Isn't preventing the deaths of innocent Americans exactly what national security is all about? If we were talking about 40,000 Americans being exposed to anthrax, do you really suppose that neither candidate would have bothered to prepare a sound bite?
The first thing the candidates might want to do is find out why so many African-American women are getting AIDS. Naturally, there are several factors. The one getting the most publicity is black men on the "down low" -- men living with women but seeing boyfriends on the side.
But that is not the real problem, according to most AIDS organizations. Men coming home from prison is a much bigger deal. Fully 95 percent of American prisons do not provide condoms. Nonetheless, an estimated 65 percent of male inmates -- even the straight ones -- have sex. So much for good behavior. When they get out, they spread the diseases they picked up to women as well as men. So, clearly, we need condoms in prison.
Consent requirement
An even bigger problem, says Talata Reeves, director of women's and family services for New York's Gay Men's Health Crisis, is that there is still no AIDS prevention tool that a woman can use that does not require the consent of a man.
Right now, if a woman suggests a condom, often her partner thinks she doesn't trust him or that she has been fooling around. But if there were a microbicide -- a virus-killing medicine women could use like a spermicide -- a lot more women could discreetly protect themselves. Alas, says Reeves, microbicide research has been "woefully underfunded" by an administration more intent on pushing abstinence and marriage.
Too often, notes Reeves, poor women cannot insist on either of those options. "If you don't have an income and he does, or if you don't have another way of feeding your children, or if you are an immigrant and undocumented," it is harder to demand anything -- be it condom use or marriage -- from a partner.
The economic realities of poor women -- many of them black -- make them vulnerable to their partners and, apparently, invisible to politicians. Chalk up another security crisis brewing right under our leaders' noses.
X Lenore Skenazy is a columnist for the New York Daily News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.