STONECREST, Ga. — Florida-based, Black-owned healthcare company HealthyMD, has partnered up with Stonecrest’s New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and Pastor Dr. Jamal Bryant to provide free health testing in honor of World AIDS Day.
The event is being held at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church on Woodrow Road and features HealthyMD’s mobile clinics and free testing services until 2 p.m.
HealthyMD said there are nearly 1.2 million people living with HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, in the United States, and that despite progress to treat the virus, there are still challenges, especially in underserved communities.
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“Black and Brown communities, making up only one-third of the population, account for over half of new HIV cases,” HealthyMD said in a statement.
Across the U.S., southern states were home to nearly half of all new HIV infections in 2022, the organization said, and in Georgia, the rate of diagnosis was twice the national average.
Part of that is owed to facing disparate healthcare shortages and poverty rates, HealthyMD said.
The New Birth-HealthyMD partnership is intended to encourage ways to address HIV prevention by providing free and confidential healthcare testing.
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