Indiana Gov. Declares Public Health Emergency Over HIV Spike

abcnews.com ^ | 03/25/2015 | Gillian Mohney

[GIdget2004]

The governor of Indiana has declared a “public health disaster emergency” after a spike of HIV cases in southern Indiana has alarmed health officials.

Gov. Mike Pence made the declaration for Scott County after 71 confirmed and seven preliminary positive cases of HIV were found in the southeast region of the state. While nationwide HIV is primarily spread through sexual intercourse, this outbreak has been fueled by intravenous drug use, according to the Indiana Health Department.

"I am deeply troubled by this outbreak, and stopping it is a top priority for our department," State Health Commissioner Dr. Jerome Adams said in a statement. "We are engaging local, state, and national partners to determine where we can most effectively focus our efforts. Extra care is being taken to invest resources in getting people off drugs and into treatment, since drug abuse is the clear driving force behind this outbreak."

[Steely Tom]

Spike Lee doesn’t like people using his name without payin’ up.

[Farmer Dean]

Time to declare gay bars and bathhouses to be a public health threat and close them down.

[squidward]

I am a police officer and work the drug cases for our department. Heroin use has also spiked dramatically this year so that may have something to do with this.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

Southern Indiana is very much like the South. In fact, Indiana is often called the "Northernmost Southern state."

Probably a bunch of meth labs and heroin junkies abound.

[Secret Agent Man]

What do you exect in a society where govt endorses sodomy?

[vpintheak]

Wrap it up homo’s!

[clearcarbon]

[RetiredTexasVet]

Queers and junkies ....

[Veggie Todd]

I would expect this in California, but Indiana?

[trebb]

I thought it odd that this would kick off an emergency action - I thought HIV had a looong incubation period.

Did a few searches and found out it can be as low as 2-6 months (more rare) and 18-24 months is not odd. Some cases take a decade or so, but it appears faster than I had thought.

[liberalh8ter]

i sure hope the Red Cross uses the most accurate test possible to determine if a donor is HIV positive. It would be interesting to know how much blood they've had to discard because it was tainted.

[GIdget2004]

“I would expect this in California, but Indiana?”

Do you have any idea how much rural, midwest America is struggling with drugs? It’s awful.

[GailA]

Excuse to push questionable unsafe Gardasil vaccines.

[Beowulf9]

“Extra care is being taken to invest resources in getting people off drugs and into treatment, since drug abuse is the clear driving force behind this outbreak.”

The heroin users will only regard this HIV outbreak as a temporary bump in the road.

Waste of state money.

[Morpheus2009]

This is only declared an emergency for the fact that this is a 4 to 5 times multiplication of the pervious years’ HIV cases reported to have been acquired from dirty needles. Read the article.

[Morpheus2009]

It takes a while, relatively speaking, for outward symptoms to show up.

[Secret Agent Man]

It’s been well known that there’s a higher than normal correlation between gays and iv drug users being the same people or circulating in the same groups of people. Both are high risk behaviors and go together (correlate) at higher than normal rates than the general heteroseual population.

So personally I am still not surprised.

[Morpheus2009]

Neither am I, in fact, if they included what was not reported as IV drugs, the numbers would be higher.