The Belle Glade syndrome: As Florida's HIV rates almost quadruple the national average, the story of one small farming town still resonates
MIAMI, FLORIDA: Florida's nightlife epicenter Ocean Drive has emerged as the hotspot of the recent resurgence of HIV infections, drawing comparisons with the town of Belle Glade.
As per the 2021 data released by AIDSvu, the infection rate of Ocean Drive is four times the national average, reports Daily Mail.
Ocean Drive turns into the new Belle Glade of Florida
The state of Florida - with several ultra-urban areas like Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville - is grappling with the new horrors of HIV infection.
The infection rates of Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties currently rank in the top five percent of all the US counties, as per reports.
Dr Mario Stevenson, infectious disease specialist and HIV researcher with the University of Miami, raised alarm and said, "The situation doesn't seem to be improving," before adding, "The problem has become white noise. A lot of people come to the area to party hard, and they are not aware of the HIV risk."
He continued, "It is so important to get the message out so people know the risk," before raising concerns that the population is not educated well enough, noting, "Some of the messaging distributed around HIV awareness doesn't translate well."
"It's not culturally tailored to resonate with vulnerable communities of color," further observed Stevenson.
This, in turn, brings the focus to the history of the small farming town of Belle Glade, which gained notoriety during the mid-1980s for the spike in the number of HIV infections at the height of the AIDS epidemic in America.
Why is Florida's Belle Glade well-known?
Belle Glade, nicknamed "Muck City" for its fertile dark soil, also earned the nickname of the "AIDS Capital of the World" due to its surge in the number of cases in the mid-1980s.
Dan Royles, an Assistant Professor of History at Florida International University, made a detailed study of the town of Belle Glade, earning its infamy in his book 'To Make the Wounded Whole'.
In the piece titled, 'The AIDS Capital of the World', Royles detailed how the small farming town earned its glory as being one of the top producers of vegetables in the USA and its subsequent loss of popularity because of the escalation in the number of HIV cases.
The disease, which was first identified by doctors in New York and California in 1981, was largely associated with communities of White, gay men in America.
But Belle Glade changed the concept while bringing in subsequent research concluding the link of HIV infection with heterosexual physical relationships.
Royles noted in his essay that the "colored town" area of southwest Belle Glade experienced deplorable living conditions during the mid-1980s as migrant workers, predominantly Black people, from Haiti, Jamaica, and the Bahamas came to work in the fields.
Poverty, malnutrition, and pathetic living conditions prevailed as the workers "crammed into the derelict apartment buildings, mobile homes, and shacks."
"In the midst of the sugarcane harvest, prostitution and drug use flourished," noted Royles, adding, "Injection drugs, popular in the early 1980s, gave way to crack cocaine as the decade wore on."
"A concurrent rise in rates of gonorrhea and syphilis pointed to crack’s power to lower sexual inhibitions, as users sought out multiple partners and sometimes traded sex for the drug," continued the historian before mentioning, "Not unlike the combustible soil that surrounded it, Belle Glade was fertile ground for HIV."
He also explored the role of the researchers Dr Mark Whiteside and Dr Carolyn MacLeod of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in bringing the media galore to the small town.
Royles wrote, "They proposed that the disease might be tied in some way to poverty: to the rats that scurried through apartments and shacks, or to the human excrement that lined Belle Glade’s streets and yards."
Pointing out the linking of poverty with the widespread nature of the disease, Royles expressed, "Perhaps poverty and malnutrition made residents more susceptible to infection from mosquito bites, which didn’t seem to be a factor anywhere else."
At its peak, Belle Glade had the highest per capita infection with 37 cases in a population of 20,000, according to a report published by Orlando Sentinel in 1985.