Your Health: Jul. 22, 2002

KIDDIE CORNER Despite growing weight problems, America's children are generally doing better than ever, according to a massive government report. It shows that 82% of kids today are in very good or excellent health. Infant mortality has dropped by nearly half from two decades ago to 6.9 deaths for every 1,000 births. And all those antismoking messages may have paid off too. Kids in eighth grade, for instance, are one-quarter less likely to smoke today than a year ago. Another positive note: the percentage of teens 15 to 17 who give birth is 2.7, an all-time low. There's room for improvement, of course. African-American babies, for example, are still 2.5 times as likely to die in infancy as white babies. But there's one sweet note for everyone: more than half of today's kids ages 3 to 5 are read to every day by a family member.

AIDS ALERT In this, the third decade of the AIDS epidemic, many young gay men still don't know whether they are infected with the AIDS virus. Researchers tested 6,000 men who frequent gay hangouts in New York, Dallas and four other U.S. cities and found that among those who had HIV, 90% of blacks, 70% of Hispanics and 60% of whites said they had no idea they were infected. The problem: not knowing who's carrying the AIDS virus makes it all the more difficult to stop its spread. --By Janice M. Horowitz

Sources: Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics; 14th International AIDS Conference