At a well-attended forum yesterday in the Mary Lou Williams Center, four speakers and about 30 audience members discussed the effects of HIV and AIDS in minority communities.
Speakers included Bobby Arrington, a minister who has become an educational activist since becoming infected with HIV several years ago, Clinical Nurse Educator Kat Turner and Jacquie Clemens, from Duke Hospital Education and Development, and Alicia Hunter, director of the Orange Grove Missionary Baptist Church's AIDS ministry.
The theme of discussion was the growing population of HIV-positive blacks nationwide and especially in Durham county.
The speakers discussed reasons for this trend and also conveyed some of their experiences in dealing with surrounding HIV and the AIDS virus. Turner presented some alarming figures to the audience. One of the most jarring was that 87 percent of HIV-infected people in Durham County are black.
This figure is almost as high, 76 percent, for all of North Carolina; overall, about 22 percent of the state's population is black.
Another statistic that Turner stressed is the rising percentage of people between the ages of 20 and 29 with HIV. Black women, however, are the group with the fastest growing HIV-positive population.
All of the panelists expressed concern about ignorance-especially within the black community-when it comes to prevention of transmission of the virus and about life with HIV.
The black community ignored AIDS for many years, Clemens said. They believed it was a disease exclusively for gay, white men. She added that it took years for black churches to get involved with the problem because of its fear of addressing the subjects of sex and homosexuality.
Hunter gave several other reasons for the current magnitude of the problem. She explained that for various social reasons, many related to poverty, African Americans do not seek health care nearly as often as they should.
One reason for this, it was proposed, is that blacks feel distrust toward the American health-care system as a residual effect of the Tuskegee experiments. During these experiments, black men were subjected to inhumane testing techniques in a study on syphilis. Arrington said that when he participated in clinical trials for HIV drugs, the knowledge of these studies frightened him.
He went on to emphasize that the drug and alcohol problem within the black community contributes to increasing transmission rates, adding that black men are rarely willing to be seen buying condoms.
Arrington also expressed concern that most people in the Bible Belt are ignorant about HIV. He agreed with Clemens that one of the problems was the Church not acknowledging the problem.
All of the speakers agreed that the black community has trouble addressing the topics of sex, homosexuality and especially HIV and AIDS, and stressed the need for a more open dialogue about the disease and its prevention. They encouraged everyone to get involved with programs such as the AIDS Service Agency and Project Straight Talk, which are constantly looking for volunteers.
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