CDC promotes HIV awareness

By Cindy Dinh     10/22/09 7:00pm

Changing health behaviors may require more than scary statistics to motivate people to act. In an effort to stave off the spread of HIV and AIDS, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention is teaming up with local media to get its message across. As part of Act Against AIDS, a five-year communication campaign to reduce HIV incidence in the United States, the CDC is hosting round-table discussions across the country.

CDC campaign workers spoke at Herring Hall last Thursday to a dozen local journalists and leaders of non-profit organizations. The event, co-hosted by the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Houston Association of Black Journalists, was designed to discuss the incidence of HIV and AIDS within the African-American community and what local media can do to inform the public.

"Infectious disease is a hot topic for a number of years and then it moves on to the next disease," Mary Benton, a reporter for KPRC-TV and president of the Houston Association of Black Journalists, said. "The CDC wanted to reengage the news media to let people know that this problem is not going away."

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The CDC is launching the first phase of its national campaign through the round-table discussions.

"Every nine-and-a-half minutes, someone in the United States is infected with HIV," Booker Daniels, Health Communications Specialist at the CDC, said, referencing the Act Against AIDS campaign message.

The situation is even more grave for certain groups, he said, pointing out that although African-Americans comprise just 12 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 46 percent of the country's citizens living with HIV.

"While there is an increase in HIV in African-American women, it continues to affect African-American men - in particular, African-American gay and bisexual men," Daniels said. "Those are very sober statistics. They should be more than enlightening - they should spur action."

Daniels said the HIV crisis in the African-American community is the CDC's top prevention priority, especially in the development of interventions to reduce disease transmission, in particular for men who have sex with men.

When it comes to prevention, he said personal values about sex and a notion of self-efficacy should be considered.

"It's about having communication skills in order to say 'You're wearing a condom - game over,'" Daniels said.

He pointed to people partaking in risky behavior earlier in life as a group which may experience a high prevalence of HIV and AIDS.

"When I was 13, I thought I was invincible," he said. "As evidence ... I jumped over a firepit filled with gasoline using a bicycle. [With] that level of poor judgment, what would prevent people from engaging in risky sexual behavior at an early age?"

On a local level, Houston has the seventh-highest number of people living with HIV and AIDS in the country. The city has 16,393 people with the diseases, Marlene McNeese- Ward, Bureau Chief of HIV/STD and Viral Hepatitis Prevention at the Houston Department of Health and Human Services, said. While African- Americans make up approximately 25 percent of Houston's population, they account for 56 percent of new HIV infections in the city.

Some students said the statistics showed the need for additional campus discussion regarding this issue.

"The Women's Resource Center does a lot on sexual issues, but you don't hear a lot of statistics on what's going on at Rice," Dorainne Levy, co-president of the Black Student Association, said. "Since Rice's black community is so small, we want to see what other schools are doing and implement that here."

Levy, a Will Rice College senior, said students from the University of Houston, who were also in attendance at the same lecture, discussed how they cultivated discussion on their campus. The UH chapter of Keep a Child Alive, an international non-profit organization composed of high school and college chapters, dispersed 500 T-shirts on the UH campus with the words "HIV Positive" emblazoned on the front in an effort to open up discussion and see how people would react to the statement. The students said they wanted to create dialogue and dispel the belief that in order to get AIDS, one must live in a developing country.

"It shows that HIV has no face," Hanszen College senior Anisha Turner said. "Anyone can have it."

Members of the local media, including reporters, publishers and radio hosts, discussed how the media can report health stories focusing specifically on certain communities.

One of the challenges in the African-American community is self-promotion, Tara Young, Assistant Business Editor for the Houston Chronicle, said.

"If you look at other groups, they're constantly calling the newspaper; they're pitching ideas," Young said. "Don't get discouraged if your issue is not on the 10 p.m. news. Keep on sending us ideas."

She encouraged individuals and groups to find different avenues to get their message across, including blogs, radio and weekly television programs.

While the media is not always looking to publish negative images, active participation from the community is needed to generate positive stories, Isiah Carey, a reporter for KRIV-TV, said.

"In order for you to get positive images on television, you have to get those positive images to step forward," Carey said.

Drawing from his own experiences, he said people who are more successful in the African-American community tend to shy away from the camera.

"Those positive images you'd like to see are running away from the camera," Carey said.

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