“And with 2% of the population identifying as gay...I wonder what these stats TRULY mean?”
With roughly 160 million men in the U.S., and 27 million of them under 15, 2% would leave us with about 2.6 million gay men. With an infection rate of 500,000 per year that would mean virtually all young gay men are being infected, since the older ones already have been.
Keep in mind that anal sex and injected drugs is pretty much the only way (statically) for a man to get infected with HIV.
THere is no way near an infection rate of 500,000 per year; there’s about 50,000.
There are about 2 million gay men, of whom about 800,000 to 1 million are infected. An additional 500,000 have died.
Of the newly infected, 28,500 are gay men who do not use intravenuous drugs; 8,000 are black heterosexuals including those who engage in heterosexual sodomy; 1300 are white heterosexual women; only 546 were white men
Don’t flip out over that needle prick, doctors and nurses: Only 0.4% of those acquiring HIV infections from means other than drug use of sex get AIDS from the HIV infection. (in 2010, that’s 31 out of 7,600.)