AIDS Program Aims at Indigent Latinos

Juan Luis Merced takes his message about AIDS to park benches, gay bars, soup kitchens and crack houses.

He goes door to door in mostly Latino neighborhoods handing out flyers about where to go for information and testing for El Sida--AIDS in Spanish.

As the AIDS virus seeps into the nation’s smaller cities, there is a growing need for people to take AIDS education to those who need it most: intravenous drug users, minorities, the homeless, the poor.

“Those people are the ones who are missed through the more traditional modes of health education,” said Imani Thompson, a health education specialist for the national Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. “It makes sense that people in smaller communities are trying to figure out methods to deal with this because this problem is everywhere.”

The tests here are conducted at the Heartside Clinic, which began the AIDS program in May with state funding.

The clinic is located in a tiny storefront in the heart of the city’s Skid Row, which attracts a large percentage of the city’s transient population, drug and substance abusers and prostitutes.

Of those coming to the clinic, about 80% are considered at high risk of contracting AIDS. Of about 80 tests conducted since May, 14 people have tested positive.

Outside God’s Kitchen, the city’s biggest soup kitchen, Merced greets many of the dozens of men and women who form a line halfway down the block for a free meal.

“I try to be a friend first and get their trust,” said Merced, 29. “They know me as the AIDS man. And that’s OK.”

Free Testing

Merced, a native of Puerto Rico, has been successful in getting indigent members of the city’s Latino community into the clinic for free testing.

“We’ve been flooded since we got someone who can break the language barrier,” project director Pat O’Connor said. “That’s not easy to find in this part of the country.”

For those who test positive for the HIV virus, counselors construct a “life plan,” arranging for medical care, housing and food.

“This is such a disenfranchised group of people, you can’t tell them that they’ll have to go to one place to fill out a form, go to another halfway across town to get their medical care and another to get food. . . . The next time you’ll see them, they’ll be in the emergency room,” O’Connor said.

In the beginning, some people questioned whether such a program was needed in this conservative western Michigan city of 180,000, said Dr. David Baumgartner, medical director of the program.

‘Tremendous Amount of Denial’

“There was and continues to be a tremendous amount of denial in this community that HIV is a problem,” Baumgartner said. “But it’s like a ball rolling downhill, gaining momentum. As word gets out, we keep seeing more and more people coming in.”

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome is caused by a virus that damages the body’s immune system, leaving victims susceptible to infections and cancer.

As of July 31, 1989, the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had recorded a cumulative total of 102,621 cases of AIDS in the United States, with 59,391 deaths.

CDC estimates that 1 million to 1.5 million Americans have already been infected with the AIDS virus, and of that total, 20% to 30% will develop AIDS by the end of 1991.