ATLANTA (Reuters) — Black men in the United States are nearly seven times more likely to be diagnosed with HIV than their white counterparts, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report released last week.Blacks represent 13 percent of the US population but account for nearly half of Americans living with the disease, and 40 percent of AIDS deaths and 61 percent of all new diagnoses of people aged 13-24 are black, the CDC said.

The report, which is based on 2001-2005 data, does not reveal a dramatic increase in the rate of HIV infection among blacks and it shows a significant decline in black mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

But it cements a picture of an epidemic that disproportionately affects the black community, said Robert Janssen, director of the CDC’s division of HIV/AIDS prevention. “What is beginning to happen is a recognition of the severity of the problem,” Janssen said in an interview.

“Black men particularly are hard-hit. The HIV diagnosis rate among black men is seven times higher than among white men,” he said, adding that men who have sex with men account for around half of those cases.

In Philadelphia and Washington, some three percent of blacks are living with AIDS, a rate higher than Senegal’s and on par with Cameroon in central Africa, he said.

Blacks do not engage in riskier sexual behaviour than other groups, Janssen said, but high HIV infection rates mean blacks who have sex with other blacks are more likely to get HIV than people within other ethnic groups. Federal allocations to the CDC for directly funding community organisations to fight AIDS in the black community have increased 10-fold since 1988 and now stand at $30 million while total programme funding is $300 million, the CDC said. Janssen said the agency was expanding prevention services, increasing opportunities for diagnoses, encouraging all blacks to know their HIV status and developing new interventions. As part of that effort, the CDC organised a meeting for black community leaders.

Black leaders have been criticised for being slower to mobilise against HIV and AIDS than leaders of other groups such as gay whites.