Their estimate includes victims of sexual abuse in addition to men who regularly or voluntarily have sex with men. The World Health Organization estimates that at least 3% and as high as 16% of men have had sex at least once with a man. Demographics ĭetermining the number of men who have ever had sex with another man is difficult worldwide. MSM is often used in medical literature and social research to describe such men as a group for research studies without considering issues of self-identification because it offers better behavioral categories for the study of disease-risk than identity-based categories (such as "gay", "bisexual", or "straight"), because a man who self-identifies as gay or bisexual is not necessarily sexually active with men, and someone who identifies as straight might be sexually active with men. But, the term has been attributed to Glick et al., because their usage in a 1994 study solidified the concept in medical terminology. The terms MSM and women who have sex with women (WSW) have been used in medical scholarship since at least 1990. Similarly, the label excludes men who identify as gay or bisexual, but who have never had sex with another man, including many gay teenagers. Many MSM choose not to (or cannot for other reasons) identify as homosexual or bisexual. Men who have sex with men (abbreviated as MSM, also known as males who have sex with males) are male persons who engage in sexual activity with members of the same sex, regardless of how they personally identify themselves.
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The United Nations estimates that 2 to 20% of MSM are infected with HIV, depending on the region they live in.
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population, but they are consistently the population group most affected by the HIV/AIDS virus and are the largest proportion of American citizens with an AIDS diagnosis who have died. MSM are only a small percentage of the U.S. However, globally, MSM are still considered a "key population," meaning they have high rates of HIV and are at high risk for acquiring the virus.
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Scientists now know that HIV does not only affect the gay community and can infect anybody, regardless of sex, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
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By 1982, the condition was referred to in the medical community as Gay-related immune deficiency (GRID), "gay cancer," and "gay compromise syndrome." It was not until July 1982 that the term Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was suggested to replace GRID, and even then it was not until September that the CDC first used the AIDS acronym in an official report. A month later, The New York Times reported that 41 homosexuals had been diagnosed with Kaposi’s Sarcoma, and eight had died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made. The first official report on the virus was published by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) on Jand detailed the cases of five young gay men who were hospitalized with serious infections. Since reports of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) began to emerge in the United States in the 1980s, the HIV epidemic has frequently been linked to gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM) by epidemiologists and medical professionals. HIV among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men