AIDS Efforts Must Be ‘Culturally Relevant,’ Experts Say

Educational information to curb a disproportionate rate of AIDS among minority groups will not be effective unless it is delivered in a “culturally relevant” way, through community-based organizations, a group of experts advised the President’s AIDS commission Thursday.

“Minorities need special educational approaches which take language and cultural norms into account,” said Dr. Concha Saucedo, executive director of the Instituto Familiar de la Raza. “For educational materials to have their maximum desired effectiveness, it is essential to have not only bilingual staff but also bicultural staff participating throughout all stages of development.”

Saucedo set the tone for the two-day hearing that opened at the San Francisco Department of Public Health by noting that the 13-member commission has no member who is Chicano, adding: “. . . And that is the problem we are facing.”

She was among speakers representing black, Latino, American Indian, Asian and hemophiliac community-based groups whose recommendations will be considered by the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic to formulate a national AIDS policy before it disbands later this year.

Their recommendations included that there be significant minority representation at the highest level of AIDS service programs, that prevention education be given in the language of targeted minority groups and that more funding be devoted to bilingual AIDS telephone hot-line services, community clinics and counseling centers.

Messages for teen-agers, they said, should also be linguistically relevant and given by age peers in formats they understand best such as “rap” contests, videos or comic books.

While these experts agreed that the job of tailoring messages to fit the characteristics of the nation’s myriad minority groups will not be easy, they suggested it could be done through the use of people with ties to the community.

“One problem is that many of the terms (used in literature about AIDS) do not even exist in the Asian community,” said Davis Ja, executive director of the Asian AIDS Project. “How do you address the problem when you have to begin a whole new vocabulary?”

Meanwhile, Philip Tingely, director of social services at the Corp. for American Indian Development, said time may be running out for native Americans. These people have among the highest levels of drug and alcohol abuse and teen-age pregnancy, he said. States with large American Indian populations report sexually transmitted disease rates 10 to 100 times higher than the national average, he said.

“Projecting from our high levels of substance abuse . . . and teen pregnancies,” he said, “if our populations do not receive a 100% level of AIDS prevention education, we will be looking at the final chapter in native American history after the year 2000.”

The President’s commission today is expected to hear from the mayors of San Diego, Sacramento and San Francisco and from state AIDS-related health policy makers.

The AIDS virus is commonly transmitted through sexual intercourse, the sharing of unsterilized hypodermic needles by drug users and from woman to fetus during pregnancy. In this country AIDS has primarily afflicted homosexual and bisexual men and intravenous drug users and their sexual partners.

As of March 14, 56,212 cases of AIDS had been diagnosed in the United States, resulting in 31,420 deaths.