Among black men with a college degree, HIV deaths for every 100,000 people in the population plummeted from 117 before HAART to 15 after those medications became available. For similarly educated white men, those numbers slid from 26 to two.

But when researchers looked just at men and women with less education — those who had gone no farther than high school — the numbers were alarming. Black women with no more than a high school diploma saw almost no change in death rates from HIV over 15 years of the study. From 1993 to 1995, about 30 black women for every 100,000 people in the general population died of AIDS. From 2005 to 2007, that number was about 27.