School, church, public campaigns about AIDS needed, experts say
AIDS is spreading, experts say, because the word about it is not.
“In some churches, especially among the older population, they don’t even want you to talk about it,” says Debra Lloyd, a Mississippi State University doctoral student and co-author of a study about African-American women’s attitudes toward HIV/AIDS in the Delta.
“They don’t believe that’s the place for it. But it is, and so are the schools.”
As far as Lloyd is concerned, ignorance about, and stigmas attached to, AIDS will persist and worsen without a concentrated effort to get out the word.
She and the lead researcher in the study, Mississippi Valley State University professor Ademola Omishakin, offer several solutions, including:
# Training volunteer health workers who are black to work as HIV/AIDS educators in rural communities. Those workers would include church members and high school and college students.
# Targeting African-Americans with a mass communications HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention campaign. This would involve newspapers, TV and radio stations, colleges and universities.
# Creating community-based programs of health promotion, education and prevention by mobilizing churches, school systems, colleges and universities, black sororities, 100 Black Men groups, etc.
State and local governments must be involved, Lloyd says. “If the government had a hand in it, improving the spread of health information would be more affordable.
“Look at the issue of fighting obesity,” she says, referring to Gov. Haley Barbour’s well-publicized Let’s Go Walking campaign. “When the government comes in and advertises on TV, then it’s engraved in stone.
“People will pay more attention. We see a flash here, and flash there. But on a local level, I don’t see it so much.”
The fact is, “things are happening,” says Craig Thompson, director of the state Department of Health’s STD/HIV program.
“We in Mississippi still aren’t willing to talk openly about HIV and AIDS and human sexuality. Until we do, many of those (HIV/AIDS) programs exist quietly in the communities they serve.”
In spite of some squeamishness about AIDS, many churches are openly involved. The Black Church Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS, for instance, has mustered more than 10,000 churches to provide AIDS education to their congregations and communities, reaching an estimated 2.5 million people.
Are such measures having an impact?
“It’s hard to say,” says Alfio Rausa, a district health officer for nine counties, most in the Delta. “In my district, the rates have stayed the same for AIDS the past few years - about 50 to 55 new cases per year.
“Would it have doubled without the message? Who knows?
“Also, there has been sort of a checkerboard addressing of the issue in the schools in the Delta. But we haven’t made it a part of the curriculum.
“The most successful awareness programs for other diseases, such as tuberculosis, have been with educators who are connected to the community. They arrange face-to-face meetings with people. It’s an insider sharing a cup of coffee and sharing information.
“It’s more expensive than some other programs, but it might be less expensive to spend these extra dollars now than spend it on extra AIDS cases later.”
Say you spend $25,000 a year for a health educator to meet face-to-face with people in each of Mississippi’s counties, Rausa suggests. The cost for 82 educators would be a little over $40 million for 20 years.
Compare that to the cost of treating a person infected with HIV/AIDS for a lifetime. That’s $650,000, Thompson says. “About 8,500 people are living in Mississippi with HIV/AIDS; roughly half of those are in care.” That total comes to about $2.6 billion.
“But it’s hard to sell the idea of education,” Rausa says.
People who are, or could be, directly affected by AIDS aren’t the only ones in need of an education, Thompson says.
“More research, like the study in the Delta, needs to happen in rural areas, particularly on HIV/AIDS,” Thompson says. “So much of it has been studied in large cities.
“If people on the national level don’t understand what is happening to rural areas, they are going to continue to send most of the resources to the cities.”
For the short haul, though, Thompson sees part of the solution coming out of the schools.
In Mississippi, the byword in sex education is “abstinence.” For instance, Mississippi Community Development Corp., a nonprofit organization, provides the program “Abstinence the Best Choice” to more than 50 schools in central Mississippi and plans to add more.
Mississippi schools are not required to teach sex education or to offer information about sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS, according to information from Planned Parenthood in Alabama, which has an office in Hattiesburg. If a school does teach students about those topics, the emphasis is on abstinence-only.
“Many states are turning away abstinence-only programs and adopting scientific abstinence-based programs,” Thompson says.
Those programs teach abstinence, but also teach what will happen if you don’t practice it.
“We are sexual beings,” Thompson says, “but if we don’t know how everything interacts, we are going to continue to have children having sex.
“We need to talk about these things in an environment where it’s OK to do so. In Mississippi, we don’t have that.
“That’s why we’re No. 1 in teenage pregnancies.
“If there’s no public dialogue, we’re going to keep seeing people adversely affected by decisions they make about sex, primarily out of ignorance.”
We can eliminate ignorance about sex and AIDS the way we did it about tobacco, Rausa says.
“It was what? Thirty or 40 years of trying to get the public’s attention about cigarettes before it sunk in?
“Whole towns have banned smoking now. The public has finally perceived that this is not good for you.
“We are not at that point with HIV/AIDS. If we were, people would behave differently.”
By Gary Pettus
gpettus@clarionledger.com
