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Sun coverage: AIDS in Baltimore

Reporter Jonathan Bor and photographer Kim Hairston spent over a year exploring the roots of the HIV epidemic in Baltimore.

Sharon Williams walks the streets in Southwest Baltimore after getting her drugs. She is on her way to an abandoned rowhome in Carroll Park where she gets high and sometimes stays the night. (Sun photo by Kim Hairston / June 21, 2007)

AIDS in Baltimore

Photos
• An educator spreads the word
• The cost of addiction

Video: Angela Jackson talks about living with HIV

PDF: Baltimore's burden

About the project

Reporter Jonathan Bor and photographer Kim Hairston spent over a year exploring the roots of the HIV epidemic in parts of West Baltimore where the city's rates are highest. After finding that the sale of sex for drugs plays a key role in transmission, the reporter interviewed 19 women who have supported themselves this way.

Bor and Hairston, who have each worked for The Sun for nearly 20 years, got to know three of the women to gain a better understanding of their lives. The articles rely heavily on their personal accounts. All three granted access to their medical records or doctors.

Bor, a medical reporter, also interviewed dozens of physicians, epidemiologists, social workers and drug treatment experts.

July 31, 2008

Sun follow-up

Help with health comes to Block

Under glowing neon signs, amid strippers, barkers and a nervous parade of humanity, something unprecedented is happening on The Block in Baltimore.

March 28, 2008

More AIDS action urged

Six years after city officials declared a "state of emergency" over Baltimore's AIDS problem, a commission is calling for stronger prevention efforts to reverse an epidemic that remains one of the nation's worst.

February 4, 2008

Sun follow-up

Saving lives, one woman at a time

Tracey McCormick wears a white do-rag, a basketball jacket and a grateful expression. Her neighborhood of boarded-up houses, rife with drug addiction and prostitution, is short on warm comforts.

November 9, 2007

Targeting link between HIV, prostitution and addiction

Women who sell sex for drugs will receive new attention from public health authorities interested in finding ways to curb the spread of HIV.

November 5, 2007

Many steps to a fresh start

Angela Jackson strides down Pennsylvania Avenue with pamphlets under her arm, unfazed by the line of dealers hawking drugs beneath blinking police cameras. " James Brown, James Brown!" cries one young man, applying the late soul star's name to his heroin capsules. " Ray Charles, Ray Charles!" cries another.Places like this are utterly familiar to Jackson, who once supported a heroin addiction by selling sex to men eager to step into an alley or vacant building. Today, she spots someone who's trolling for customers as she once did.

November 5, 2007

'I can't turn it off'

More than 25 years after being pressed into a life of addiction and prostitution, Ann Battle thinks she may have found a better path.

November 4, 2007

An epidemic's unseen cause

While just a teenager in the 1970s, she danced on The Block, where she snorted cocaine and heroin and sold sex in backrooms. Later, with her addictions firmly rooted, she set out on her own, offering her body on the streets of West Baltimore as a deadly virus was spreading.