Jeanni McCarty, a nurse and native of this threadbare city of 4,200, hurried up and down Main Street in Saturday’s bright sun, handing out stacks of fliers to any business that would take them. They were announcing a hastily planned specialty clinic — FREE, they emphasized in red — that would provide H.I.V. treatment to anyone who needed it.
Quite suddenly, a lot of people around here do. And the number keeps growing.
More than 80 people in Scott County have tested positive for H.I.V. since December, mostly in the last few weeks. They range in age from 20 to 56, and health officials say almost all of them live in Austin, which sits along Interstate 65 about 80 miles south of Indianapolis, surrounded by rural space. The outbreak, the worst in Indiana’s history, stems largely from the intravenous use of the prescription painkiller Opana, which everyone from the police to pastors to the owner of the city’s sole grocery recognizes as a plague on one ragged neighborhood in particular.
[For more of this story, written by Abby Goodnough, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03...urb-hivs-spread.html]
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