City target of AIDS campaign
Black residents among worst affected in state
Brockton has one of the highest rates of African-Americans infected with HIV/AIDS in the state, making the city a target in the first statewide campaign in four years to encourage people to get tested for the virus.
Throughout this month, the state Department of Public Health will embark on a marketing campaign titled "Get Talking, Get Tested," hosting special testing events, and blasting advertisements on public transit systems. The campaign coincides with National HIV Testing Day on June 27.
The campaign is specifically reaching out to African-Americans, who make up the highest concentrations of people living with AIDS, and of new people contracting the virus.
"This campaign is designed . . . to send a signal to African-Americans that they should be talking about HIV with their partners, and their medical providers," said Kevin Cranston, director of the HIV/AIDS bureau for the Department of Public Health. "And hopefully that will encourage people to get tested and know their HIV status."
Statewide figures show blacks make up 28 percent of the Massachusetts residents living with HIV or AIDS, while they make up only 6 percent of the overall state population - a rate of infection at 11 times higher than the white population.
In Brockton, the percentages are even more disproportionate.
Of the 24 people who tested positive for the AIDS virus in 2006, 13 of them - 54 percent - were black. And of the 369 people who were living with AIDS or HIV in 2006, 190 of them were black, or 51 percent.
They include people like Charles Bunn, 60, who learned he had HIV in 1990, after finally getting tested when a friend died of AIDS. Until then, Bunn had for decades shared hypodermic needles to shoot heroin with a close group of friends, and several of them, including members of his own family, have since died.
Bunn, who seeks treatment at the Brockton Neighborhood Health Center, said that he has learned to live with the virus, but that testing positive changed his life. He still shot heroin for a decade after testing positive, he acknowledged, but stopped sharing needles and only had protected sex with his longtime partner.
He has three children, none of whom has contracted the virus. If it weren't for getting tested, he could have spread the virus to someone else, something he said he could never live with.
"I did this to myself; someone else doesn't have to suffer with what I have," said Bunn. "It's out there, and people need to know it's out there. All I know is I got it."
Cranston, of the health department, said a number of factors could explain the prevalence of African-Americans contracting HIV, with no easy answer. For one, if the virus is in the community it will tend to stay in the community.
"If you had the same sexual practice in the same community, a person is more likely to be engaging in sex with a person with HIV," Cranston said.
But a number of factors that affect minority populations in other adverse ways could also contribute to the high rates, he added.
The highest rates of HIV-infected people are in urban, low-income communities, where people have less access to healthcare or educational programs, and have an increased risk of drug use.
Refugees or immigrants coming from other parts of the world where HIV/AIDS is prevalent, such as Africa or the Caribbean, could help explain the disparity.
According to health department figures, immigrants and refugee populations often have late diagnoses, with 32 percent of black individuals and 36 percent of foreign-born individuals receiving a diagnosis of AIDS within two months of learning that they were HIV positive.
That means they were living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, for a long time before being tested.
The marketing campaign, with a $690,000 grant from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will focus awareness efforts in Brockton and four other cities: Boston, Springfield, Worcester and Lynn.
The work is meant to coincide with programs the Department of Public Health has already established with local agencies holding testing clinics and offering their own marketing campaigns and regular support services.
Maureen Crossey, director of operations for public health services at BAMSI, a Brockton-based agency, said a number of programs, with components for housing, case management, and nutritional education, have been shared with community agencies including churches to help in the awareness campaign.
"It's a community that's really interested in addressing the public health and social challenges of the community," she said.
BAMSI also works with the Brockton Neighborhood Health Center, which serves low-income residents, including those who don't have health insurance, to reach out to people and encourage them to get tested.
Tim Comeaux, assistant director of social services at the Neighborhood Health Center and the agency's HIV/AIDS program director, said more than half of the people in his program are minorities. Of the Health Center's clients as a whole, 28 percent are Cape Verdean, and 14 percent are Haitian. Comeaux said it's vital to reach out to leaders in the community, to stress the importance of testing.
The same factors of poverty, substance abuse, and lack of access to healthcare that affect minority communities contribute to the increased HIV risks, he said.
"All these things kind of swirl around to make the minority population more vulnerable to HIV, and that needs to be addressed and there needs to be a strategy to deal with that," he said. "It's preventable, and it's not going away. There's something missing right now." 