"Alex" <avdeelen.REMOFETHIS1@wanadoo.nl> wrote in message

I'm sure that will be the case. The hetro MSMs (snicker) will be tested
and the dow down numbers will increase.

Well we do agree on something.

Right. It would be wrong to point at MSM behavior that will
bring the numbers up.

The liberal spin just doesn't work well for you does it?

"Alex" <avdeelen.REMOFETHIS1@wanadoo.nl> wrote in message

Podcast: Randy Shilts

Correction: This story should have said that when a black person dies of AIDS, many times,
regardless of the person's gender, behavior or sexual orientation, friends and family members
say other illnesses caused the death. That perpetuates the belief that AIDS is not a black
epidemic.

- - -

When AIDS emerged 25 years ago, it was branded a gay white man's disease.

Millions of dollars poured into research and prevention efforts have reduced the number of
diagnoses and deaths in the United States over the years. But that success hasn't touched
African Americans, many of whom have remained reluctant to acknowledge the disease's impact in
their community.

From the epidemic's start, black people have been disproportionately likely to test positive
for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. African American men, women and children now account for
51 percent of new HIV diagnoses -- up from 25 percent in 1985 -- and 55 percent of people dying
nationally of AIDS, although they make up 13 percent of the U.S. population.

The black community's high poverty rate contributes to this disparity, because poor people have
less access to medical information, preventive health care and treatment, researchers say.
Higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases also contribute because a person with genital
lesions, for example, is more likely to contract HIV and a person carrying another disease in
addition to HIV is more likely to transmit the HIV.

But AIDS activists, researchers and people with HIV say a much bigger factor has been the
ongoing reluctance by many African Americans to address the disease at all.

More than 2 percent of all African Americans are HIV-positive, a higher incidence rate than in
any other group, according to a federal analysis of cases between 1999 and 2002 cited by the
nonprofit Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Black women make up two-thirds of new HIV
diagnoses among women, and black teens make up 66 percent of cases among youth.

African Americans are the only group experiencing a continuous rise in HIV infections, even
though there is little difference from the rest of the population in how black people contract
it.

The decades-long lag in identifying AIDS as a black health crisis results from both the
disease's initial label as a white epidemic and its association with homosexuality, which
carries a heavy stigma in the black community. Influential black people and black secular and
religious institutions have been slow to embrace black AIDS victims, demand government aid or
speak out.

"AIDS wasn't thought of as a black disease for a very long time," said Jennifer Kates, director
of HIV policy for the Kaiser Foundation. "The initial response was led by the white gay
community, and that defined what people thought of the AIDS epidemic."

Many thought that would change when basketball legend Magic Johnson announced he had HIV in
1991. He created a foundation that put millions of dollars into treatment centers and free
testing, and he continues to promote education and prevention.

But his was a lonely voice.

It wasn't until 1999 that the first national conference explored AIDS as a black issue, even
though it was the leading killer of African Americans ages 25 to 44 from 1990 through 2000.

However, the community may be on the cusp of a new approach this year, the 25th since the
epidemic began. Several "Call to Action" events are planned this month locally and nationally.
For example, the NAACP, Urban League, Black Entertainment Television and celebrities plan to
gather in New York today to "sound an alarm" about the epidemic.

Denial that AIDS is epidemic among blacks makes people reluctant to be tested and treated, or
to talk openly with their sex partners about the disease. The stigma against gays in the black
community, especially within churches, exacerbates this problem, experts say.
"People with AIDS have paid their tithes, and the pastor still beats them over the head," said
Sherry Thomas, coordinator at the Walker House, an Oakland facility for the chronically ill
that is funded by the City of Refuge United Church of Christ in San Francisco. "It is like if
they keep them in a box, they feel safe."

Slowly, Thomas said, the box has started to open.

"People are leaving to find inclusive churches, and the dollars are falling off, so it is
starting to get attention," she said.

Still, many churches have been quiet about their AIDS ministries, and the help centers they run
can be hard to find. At funerals, the cause of death for closeted blacks who die of AIDS
complications often is presented as something else, which perpetuates the belief that AIDS is
not a black epidemic.

Oakland resident Paulette Hogan knows this paradox firsthand. When she started developing
persistent flu symptoms five years ago, the last thing on her mind was HIV. She didn't see a
doctor regularly and didn't think of getting tested until she got a job in a center for gay
youths and someone suggested HIV might be the cause of her ongoing illness.

"I took the test because it was clear to me that I didn't fit the profile," said Hogan, 43, who
picked up the virus through sex. "In my mind, it was gay men. I was losing friends, but unless
they were gay men, it wasn't HIV, it was pneumonia or kidney failure. No one was talking about
it happening to people like me."

Black health advocates and community leaders say they often are asked to speak at schools and
community gatherings on AIDS Day or during Black History Month, only to find the information
they provide is not being incorporated in the community.
"People under 30 have no idea that this is the No. 1 killer and still tend to think they are
invincible," said Terrance Hodges, a 43-year-old Oakland resident who was diagnosed with HIV
three years ago. "They don't have a sense of fatalism and don't think anything can stop them. I
know because I was like that. And I practiced unsafe sex.

"Violence is much more of a reality among people of African descent than

HIV."
Robert Scott, an East Oakland doctor who specializes in HIV care and treatment and sees
patients ranging from 17 to 78, said even the high death rate isn't enough.

"Whether it is a teen or a senior, folks don't take the disease seriously," he said. "The
taboos associated with it -- promiscuity, drug usage and gay sex -- make people embarrassed to
admit they may be affected."

However, the higher African American HIV infection rate is not driven by intravenous drug use
or risky sexual behavior, according to medical experts.

"There is not a significant difference between African Americans and other ethnic groups with
regard to risky behaviors," said George Lemp, an epidemiologist in Oakland who directs the
University of California's AIDS Research Program. "The riddle is why there is such a rate when
the risk behaviors appear to be similar."

Poverty plays a significant role by reducing access to health care and adding challenges to all
aspects of a person's life.

"When you are focused on basic needs like paying the rent, buying food and the electric bill,
the last thing you are thinking about is HIV," said Lisha Wilson, medical director of the Magic
Johnson AIDS Clinic in Oakland. "There are so many other issues. Poverty can lead people to do
things they wouldn't normally do, and that can involve unsafe sex."

Acceptance among African Americans that AIDS is epidemic in their community, experts agree,
will be critical to the success of prevention programs.
"We can't continue to try and use programs that were piloted and developed for white gay men,"
said Roosevelt Mosby, a founding member of the State of Emergency African American Task Force
in Alameda County. "The methods do not transfer to black people.

"We have to develop different methodologies. You can't use the same forms of treatment and
prevention for young people, men, women, black or white. If the black community can't even
admit that AIDS is an issue, how are we going to talk about preventing it?"

Phill Wilson, who founded the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles in 1999, has been pushing for
influential African Americans to take a major role in starting the community's conversation
about AIDS.

"My sole purpose is to get black folks involved, faith leaders, business leaders, celebrities
and elected officials," said Wilson, who has been living with AIDS for 15 years. "AIDS in black
America has never benefited from the power of celebrity in the way other communities have.

"It has taken 25 years, but we now have the first mobilization of any magnitude, the first
collective coordinated effort," Wilson said of today's gathering in New York. "I think black
America is ready to respond and take ownership."

Many of this country's black leaders -- including NAACP President Bruce Gordon, Urban League
President Marc Morial, BET Vice President Kelli Richardson Lawson, actor Danny Glover and Rep.
Charles Rangel, D-New York -- plan to announce an alliance committed to stopping the spread of
HIV and AIDS.

The information must come from trusted organizations in the African American community, said
Myisha Patterson, the NAACP's new national health coordinator, who is making HIV a priority for
the organization.

"If we have learned anything over the last 25 years, it is that the black community doesn't
respond to government reports," she said. "Unless your eyes are open and you are looking for
information, you are not going to see it."

Some black clergy, celebrities and media have pushed for change in past years. The Rev. Al
Sharpton and San Francisco's Bishop Yvette Flunder gathered with church leaders in Atlanta in
January to promote acceptance of gays. Before she died this spring, Coretta Scott King -- the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow -- condemned homophobia as an obstacle to AIDS prevention.

"We can't even get to AIDS without talking about homophobia first," said Sylvia Rhue, director
of religious affairs for the National Black Justice Coalition, which organized the Atlanta
meeting.

Although hip-hop artists such as Common now actively promote preventing AIDS, the limited use
of popular culture to address AIDS in the black community -- like hip-hop artists rapping and
singing about safe sex in the early 1990s -- has not had much impact in the past.
Even the legacy of 31-year-old N.W.A. rapper Eric "Eazy-E" Wright, who died of AIDS in 1995,
centers more on "gangster rap" than AIDS.

Alameda County was the first in the nation to address the disproportionate impact on the black
community. County supervisors declared a state of emergency regarding AIDS in 1998. Emergency
task force members keep politicians updated on the demographics of the disease, and work with
the California HIV Prevention and Education Project and the AIDS Project of the East Bay in
Oakland. However, members say they still are not reaching enough black residents, who account
for 41 percent of the county's AIDS cases but are only 18 percent of the population.

Wilson hopes today's meeting will change that.

"In 2006, AIDS is a black disease, full stock, through all lenses," he said. "Black people bear
the burden, and people are now going to realize that the only way to stop it in America is to
stop it in black America."

Today is the second of The Chronicle's two-day report on the AIDS epidemic 25 years after it
was first recognized in the United States.