AIDS and Minorities: Fear, Ignorance Cited : Toll Is Especially Severe Among Blacks, Latinos; Leaders Ask Funds for Information Programs

Earlier this year, Jose Perez, a Houston gay rights activist, helped publish a small pamphlet that alerted Latinos to the dangers of AIDS and urged them to call a local community center for information. The response he got was immediate and disturbing.

Some women called to ask if they could catch the deadly disease by drinking contaminated water, Perez recalled. A few were concerned about infection from mosquito bites. Several men were panic-stricken that they might catch the virus by holding hands with an infected person.

‘Grim Awakening’

“The fear and ignorance out there is very high,” said Perez, who criticized civic leaders for failing to publish any AIDS materials in Spanish. “For Hispanics and blacks, there’s been a pretty grim awakening these days about the disease and what it can do to them.”

Perez’s story and others like it were urgent topics this weekend at the nation’s first conference on AIDS and Minorities, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. More than 1,000 health professionals and community leaders, many of them from the nation’s inner cities, spoke with concern about a killer disease that was once thought to affect only gay white males but is now sweeping through their communities.

The toll has been especially severe among blacks and Latinos. Blacks make up 12% of the population but claim more than 25% of the nation’s AIDS cases, federal statistics show. Latinos, constituting 7% of the population, have 14% of the AIDS cases.

In spirited discussions with federal officials, minority leaders from California to New York demanded that the government immediately increase financing for AIDS public information programs directed at blacks and Latinos, especially teen-agers.

They also insisted on playing a greater role in the development of such media campaigns, charging that messages about “safe sex” precautions and the perils of intravenous drug use that overlook cultural differences among blacks, Latinos, gays and others are doomed to failure.

Above all, minority leaders said, blacks and Latinos must learn to overcome deep-seated taboos against public discussions of homosexuality and drug use and reach out with compassion to the growing number of AIDS patients in their midst.

“This disease is the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse in our nation’s minority communities,” said Dr. Donald R. Hopkins, deputy director of the CDC. “We must not let sensitivity or embarrassment impede our ability to address those urgent problems. They are not pleasant topics, but the alternative to facing up to the facts (about AIDS) is worse.”

Researchers have determined that the AIDS virus--known as acquired immune deficiency syndrome--can be contracted through unprotected vaginal or anal sex with an infected partner, and also through intravenous needles contaminated with the virus. Scientists estimate that more than 1.5 million people are carrying the AIDS virus, but most of them have not contracted the disease.

22,747 Deaths Cited

Overall, the CDC reported, 36,659 males and 2,935 females have been diagnosed as infected with AIDS since record-keeping began in 1981. In that period, 22,747 AIDS victims have died.

Minority ignorance about the causes and prevention of AIDS is a worsening problem, Hopkins said. During a somber keynote speech, he noted that 54% of all AIDS patients under the age of 13 are black and 24% are Latino. Among women, 52% are blacks and 19% are Latino. Nearly 40% of AIDS patients who have been i.v. drug users or have had sexual relations with i.v. drug users are black and Latino, contrasted with only 12% for white males, he said.

But the key concern, Hopkins cautioned, are the thousands of minority men, women and children who are carrying the AIDS virus and do not know they are infected. Unless these carriers are identified and persuaded to change their behavior, so others are not infected, there could be a calamity for blacks and Latinos in the next five years, he said.

‘What Do We Do?’

“The question now is, what do we do?” said Dr. Beny Primm, a New York physician who runs an anti-drug abuse program, as the convention drew to a close. “Now that we’ve finally got the government’s attention, we need a nationwide agenda.”

The first priority, most participants agreed, is to get more federal funds for AIDS minority programs. Currently, blacks and Latinos compose 40% of the nation’s AIDS cases, but receive only small amounts in funding for community education and treatment programs.

Gay political groups have become “the real power brokers” in the allocation of AIDS funds, Primm said, largely because they had to deal with the disease first and are well-organized compared to minority groups. That funding imbalance must be redressed, he said, “in a spirit of cooperation and sensitivity.”

Federal officials agreed that more must be done and announced at the meeting that they would provide an extra $7 million for minority AIDS programs this year, and an extra $10 million next year. They said many CDC programs already target minority AIDS patients, including efforts in California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Florida.

Funds Are Minuscule

Still, they conceded, those funds are minuscule compared to other AIDS-related programs. The $7-million allocation “is a beginning, because it has taken much longer for the (minority) problem to reach the front burner,” said Dr. Herbert Nickens, director of the Office of Minority Health in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Minorities also expressed concern about the AIDS public education programs in their communities. A multitude of blacks and Latinos said those media campaigns--usually television and radio spots, along with newspaper advertisements--would fail to get the message across unless they carried “culturally sensitive messages.”

“We want to play a role in developing these messages, because they cannot be imposed on our communities by outsiders,” said Suki Ports, who directs the Minority Task Force on AIDS in New York. “It is not enough to churn out the same public health brochure for every community, changing only the color of the faces.”

Ports explained that Latino women, raised in a Roman Catholic culture, may not readily accept the advice that their men use condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS. Social workers may need to spend hours “just holding hands with these women . . . before the message may take root,” she said.

Objections to Condoms

In the black community, many sexually active males abhor the use of condoms, and government officials need to pitch a special advertising campaign at them, said Dr. Reed Tuckson, commissioner of public health in the District of Columbia.

“There’s no secret about how to sell ideas to the black community,” he said. “We know how to sell black men malt liquor and we know how to sell tennis shoes to teen-agers, so we can deal with this problem too. But the government has to understand that this must be done by people who understand the problem . . . by minorities themselves.”

On the other hand, many speakers agreed that black and Latino leaders have contributed to the panic over AIDS as a result of their prejudice against those carrying the disease, especially drug addicts, homosexuals and prostitutes.

Eunice Diaz, a member of the Los Angeles City and County AIDS Task Force and a public health specialist, charged that some influential members of Southern California’s Latino community have failed to become involved with the problem, mostly out of fear and ignorance.

Latino Physicians ‘Quiet’

She also criticized “an absence of the Latino physician in the AIDS fight,” saying “they have remained quiet at this time of crisis” and are failing to provide community-based care for patients desperately in need of attention. Diaz and other speakers said many doctors, including minority physicians, lack the specialized training required to recognize AIDS symptoms in their early stages.

Similarly, Tuckson blasted middle-class blacks in the District of Columbia for objecting to the placement of an AIDS hospice in their neighborhood. Such fear and prejudice, he said, “are unacceptable . . . especially when you consider what the minority community has at stake.”

The Rev. Carl Bean, a Los Angeles minister and activist in the fight against AIDS, said black church leaders have agreed to discuss the issue openly from the pulpit and confront prejudice head-on.

“This is a matter of compassion,” he said. “We say to those who are uncomfortable, if you can’t love the homosexual, if you can’t love the prostitute, and if you can’t love the i.v. drug user, then you truly cannot love at all.”