Warning on AIDS Aimed at Latinos

“Protejase!” Protect yourself.

That is the message of a new pamphlet on AIDS aimed at Latinos that the Orange County Health Care Agency is about to distribute at family planning clinics, its Santa Ana AIDS-testing clinic and farm-labor camps.

The Spanish-language brochure, printed in the form of a captioned picture-book or fotonovela, a popular entertainment medium in Latin America, tells the story of Fernando Jimenez, a family man who discovers to his shock that he has acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Geared toward those with a third-grade reading level, the brochure fills a gap in AIDS education, experts said.

Revised Booklet

“The word has to get out to the (Latino) community of how to avoid the risks of getting AIDS,” said Jim Pickett, a project coordinator for the AIDS Project of Los Angeles, which is planning to distribute a revised form of the booklet to 53 public AIDS testing sites in California.

“The messages have gone out in English for some time, but they have not gone out in the (Latino) community.”

Across the country, a disproportionately high percentage of Latinos have contracted AIDS. According to the 1980 U.S. Census, 6.4% of the U.S. population is Latino, with the 1987 Census estimate up to 7.7%. Yet, of the 42,300 AIDS cases reported as of Sept. 28, 14% have involved Latinos, Pickett said.

In Orange County, 51 of the county’s 430 AIDS cases reported through Aug. 1 have involved Latinos, according to the latest ethnic breakdown from the county’s AIDS registry.

Until now, there have been few pamphlets about AIDS in Spanish, and those available have usually been direct translations of material written in English, Pickett said.

By contrast, the fotonovela, designed by the advertising firm of Montoya, Rasche in the City of Orange, was produced for a Latino audience.

‘Macho’ Latinos

It sends a message to “macho” Latinos who might not have considered themselves at risk for the deadly disease: “El SIDA no descrimina.” (“AIDS does not discriminate.”) The brochure notes that AIDS is not a homosexual disease but may affect intravenous drug users and those who do not consider themselves homosexual but occasionally have sexual relations with men.

That message is particularly important in the Latino community, where “there is a kind of homosexual behavior--highly closeted and very difficult to discuss--in which a hyper-masculine type of man can have relationships with men and women but clearly does not see himself as homosexual,” said Raul Magana, an AIDS community education supervisor in Orange County.

Fabiola Almada, the copywriter for Montoya, Rasche, agreed: “There’s a strong denial factor in the (Latino) community. They think AIDS only affects homosexuals. They do need to be informed.”

AIDS educators might want to copy the simple fotonovela format in designing educational materials for other groups--teen-agers, for instance, said Penny C. Weismuller, Orange County’s AIDS coordinator.

“Most AIDS educational materials are geared to people with a higher reading level, but the people we need to reach are not interested in going through a lot of dry information. . . . This gets the message across and keeps people interested.”

In the next month, the county’s AIDS education project plans to spend about $2,500 distributing 5,000 copies of the fotonovela in Orange County. Beginning in January, the AIDS Project Los Angeles expects to spend $30,000 distributing it statewide.