many in the black community have long memories and today have a clear distrust for government run health agencies part of what drives each of you know community to these are historical perspective disenfranchisement to speak is very very much aware and knife in our communities we still have many communities are we talking about and this is a conspiracy the government wanted to kill soft so maybe we still have people who still have that mindset people don't like to say. that a government would make an effort to destroy people but black people have had a history. of tusky syphilis experience that was carried on by the federal government for thirty years one thousand nine hundred to one thousand nine hundred seventy two and people said at that time this is a way to get rid of the black population so that's horrible to have to think about

. and that kind of planning but we have an entire museum in washington d.c. called the holocaust memorial museum which ag maintain is the most importantly museum in the united states that everybody should go to that museum because it's not just about the death. six million people. it's about a government of intelligent people deciding to get rid of a population. they thought was a country a minute. they say adolf hitler use the term tear in that in german animal people said. as he spoke about this so much interview with rich. sold people who think conspiracy theories conspiracy no doubt set up a conspiracy is when one segment makes

a play and against the interests of another segment and the other segment doesn't know anything about it. and when it comes to matters of mental health and therapy. this is not guy. was. half. the. time to. have kids. this. is going to back you. was. the trouble. was just. not been done. and i think until you know even in the medical school curriculum you know. when to

talk about hiv you know important it is going to go into the next generation. is not just ignorance and stigma associated with the disease but in lack of compassion to keep. by nineteen ninety five h.i.v. infections among black americans had surpassed white america. blacks accounted for forty percent of all newly infected h.i.v. cases. the most startling discovery was to learn that african-american women accounted for a greater proportion of new aids cases among african-americans overall in two thousand and three. it rose to become the number one cause of death for black women ages twenty five to thirty four and persis this day.

after ten years from now. my husband and three year old daughter and at the age of twenty nine discovered to have. my third child was born very sick. we didn't know what was wrong with her no one was able to tell us what was wrong she was in and out of doll spittle and by the time she was about two my husband began to get sick my husband wasn't feeling well he had a cough we kept going to different doctors kept misdiagnosing him first they said he had allergies they gave him allergy shots then they said he had tb they tested him he's fine it doesn't have to be after about a full year of trying to figure out what was wrong and they then said ok your blood count is really no he went into the emergency room and they said well you probably

have a bleeding ulcer so let's admit you to the hospital and let's check you for you know we're not all syringes and we can take care of it they kept misdiagnosing him because he was a family man he was married to me on a home we had children in private school so we didn't fit that stereotype of what people with aids. look like people have histories people have done things in their lives. but he had been clean for over ten terrorists so they didn't see any marks they didn't see anything that they thought was suspicious i guess that's the assumption and seldom ever asked him so what happened is that people's perception of who got a scot in that way. so by the time they figured it all out he did not have a bleeding ulcer and they then said ok we need to ask you some other questions you

know have you ever done drugs and those type of questions and then he said yes several years ago when i was in the service. and they tested him and he came back with full blown aids. fellow even while my husband was sick and dying and a half but all you know i made up i did like many of us you know i made up stories of what he had won telling the truth. because of discrimination because of fear because of him i don't want to people to be afraid of me he die on january first new year's day of course it all made sense then what was wrong with the baby and then she died. on into it of that year.

i tested myself and my two other children thank god they were healthy and they did not have to virus but i did when i was diagnosed i was very sick i was ab pounds i had no t. cells and i was extremely ill so i was diagnosed with aids diagnosis not an a.t.v. diagnosis i was given less than two years to live in the course of six brief months lost her husband of ten years first three year old baby girl and was herself diagnosed with aids. when she reached out to her family i'm blessed that i have the family that i do we don't talk about it but i've never felt like they were afraid to be around me for many of those newly infected with hiv aids silent to acceptance

by family and friends is often not enough after everything happened i went to one support group and it was all guys they were nice men. and i was the only woman the problem with that was many of those guys were talking about things like how do i tell my parents or my family that i am homosexual. they were those were their conversations and their fears and discussions of course when i brought up i am in panic i just lost my husband my baby i have an eight in a four year old i'm going to die so what do i do with my kids i have to stop working i'm now on disability i went from two incomes to a fixed income a disability check i'm trying to figure it all out so of course i think i'm going to die because that's what i was told and for women for mothers our

our focus now becomes not even about herself. it's about our children what's going to happen to our children my children are going to be orphans i can't even stand to be in the house with them and watch them playing because i was so heartbroken that i'm going to be leaving and i could identify with the guys in the group so i figure i need to talk to some women and see i'm i the only one with this or or or what recognizing that her doctor was seeing other female patients. came up with an idea i asked my doctor if i could put a flyer in our home in her office. some of the women so the whole a flyer in her office my put a secret phone line in my home because lots of family and friends didn't know i was dealing with this issue and started ringing and i started we started talking to

each other just on the phone none of us wanted to show our faces and as we became more comfortable i would meet them in a coffee shop we started giving each other support that way and then started to support in my home where women will come together bring their children and. talk rye prepared for death and all of those things they were doing pretty much a. women's group. concerns. from a support group. quickly realize that services for women were non-existent if moms need to get to the doctor she was given a token to get on the bus to the doctor. she was given enough tokens to take the children to the doctor with her so basically she had no childcare she had no transportation so she couldn't go to the doctors she ended up seeing a doctor became a network of women and we shared our our very limited resources we

shared our trans. try. driving children. including. your system. full of shy women. brave souls. able to accommodate the growing number of. women in her home. and started women in washington d.c. . women are. we are taking care of children.

parents. our own. to take care of everybody. and i think. that is. helpful. and support women around the support system. to help them to be able to take care of themselves.

to better understand why age hiv aids are still so persistent in the black community we checked in with you gate straight after all it is they who will determine the face of the disease in the years to come. led mission. couldn't take should be free. for charges.

three. three. three. mostly blown video for your media project a free media dog r.t. dot com. me it is easy to believe. it is easy. to. see. the body.

i think education is definitely one of the more important pieces to it because people are getting the wrong information in their sprains malling information. we learned about the technical aspects of. what it is what it stands for percentage is things like. effectively. yes just like general education knowing that stuff like when i took such that in school you never really learned about each

ideally we just learned late about puberty and about how to put a condom on but they don't really teach you stuff like hiv prevention and who falls into that category of who has it we're minimum in sex and we're going to show you are great men having sex they don't shoot at all here you know it's very important to know about going to times about a man and woman having sex and the risk of what happens whenever a female on a femur a male male be to broaden a larger so we know you know we need we need to be straight you need to be gay but we need to know information isn't there i think it's also important that parents talk more with their children about it we don't talk a lot about that with us kids even today it's still kind of hard to broach that subject with the young people but it is so important. and i'm a famous letters like you doing it but you will be a fool she's made it all the time to do my bit i'm

a virgin turned through rough you know your man doing the right you going to get. mugged i'm pretty sure that's not cancer that's how you catch it ok it's so she found out how to really get it she was like a lot that was a game as disease i thought they were given to us and i thought that's how you get it just from doing that i didn't have bad day with my nose and i get it i find it funny how when parents automatically assume that your child is going to be shared i mean and they kind of force feed into it that is why a lot of conversations about hiv and aids don't really it doesn't really happen in the household because you're taught. you're kind of taught by your parents to be straight and you know to talk about anything that involves your sex life because you're not street is kylie you know taboo to bring into your house it's like i'm not going to talk about you know the things that i have. you know by having sex because my mom doesn't want to hear about me having sex with another guy and for me

it is not even about just having sex with the same sex or opposite sex it's not having sex at all so it doesn't get beyond if you don't have sex and i'm not even when say you get married type stuff just on sex. you know procreation what if i'm thinking about you know i'm interested and all i can talk with my parents about it i don't feel like i can talk to them about that because they already say what they expect as soon as six so i'm like ok if i do have sex what will happen i can get pregnant well what about this and my kids. i don't know what they don't know and week slowly we don't need to get to that because it's a don't have set i think many more open dialogue about it people are still very very nervous about talking about their sexual health and their sexual behavior talking my sex is pretty normal with my group of friends but when they consummate h.i.b. and like educations that s.t.'s on it. that's not their home when it's really awkward

but we do talk about it it's not like it's not existed but usually when i hear other people talking about issues in life all some i guess unattractive or ugly will pass on their person not their sauce or. all this stuff so it's usually in a negative not inspiring or educational light but with my personal friends my close friends issues are like look we be educating people or we're just talking about trying to figure out what what we know or what's true us man simply just saying i'm a child be on my place here on the plane on the press all the blame will myself and both of those are really unhealthy and can like. people man just. with the abundance of information now available about hiv. their noses up the statistics they believe that as with vitamins all they have to do is pop a pill if they should become hiv positive. community like we do desensitize

ourselves so much from a to b. to people as i always a mental disease if you can manage it you've got to have deep pockets that manage it i mean if you don't have insurance because i don't think the average person can pay fifteen thousand nine hundred dollars in rent and still pay two hundred dollars a month for medication and for those for whom money is not a concern there is a physical cost to taking drugs to fight hiv take four pills i take one pill i take a bactrim pill because to keep infections and stuff away and then i take. the opportunity which is helps with the pain in the morning. and so i take that as the clock in the morning i wake up thirty to take medications because. i did two hours to recover from second the medication and i had to go to have my pill container and i'm out of water in the mornings when i wake up i just open the pill bottle and take the pill the water may back down and that the side effects go through the.

pain tiredness everything that i go through just let it all go through or not that's why our good. data is that. even well treated even with the best drugs someone with aids is going to live a shorter life than someone doesn't have aids and i you know i have a lot of friends on these drugs at this point both in africa and here and you know if they could go back and change that and live a life free of a trivium i know for sure for certain that they would. with thirteen percent of the population yet we have the highest rate of infection and again it goes into not a single answer. if i look at how blood pressure what we've looked at colon cancer where will we be if i look at breast cancer where will we be if i look at. it to

one it is clear that the tremendous growth of hiv and aids in america's black community is driven by many factors yet no matter whom we spoke to physicians clergy political leaders and those afflicted with the virus it was clear that the real culprits behind the epidemic are ignorance miscommunication and most importantly a collective silence about how it is transmitted what it means to live with hiv and it's phenomenal spread across black america. if we sincerely want to help the spread of this barbarous this is a problem that frankly is substantially preventable if there were really good public health campaigns if people really focused on this problem you certainly should be able to have a lot less a trophy a lot less human suffering and you would and that would mean a lot less energy and resources both in that a societal level but also personally trying to deal with it down the why when

someone thirty six years i was in london in the mid one nine hundred eighty was saying you couldn't turn on the television without seeing the commercial about age having a child be a child be you know can protect yourself be attested etc you know day after day after day after day after day after day after day and that's public health education in my view we have not had to add a level of intensity and public health education. and we still don't have the bill we are still talking about any increase in the number of cases and we need to talk more to people who other people trust in the communities like for example the hair salon the barber shops we go there all the time we have conversations in there about everything you know so you know getting the right information it's in places like that places of worship getting the correct information that's a beer can can really help kind of hope this disease if they do think that you can

more conversations better you don't necessarily need leadership from the church which you really need is leadership from somebody right so well that happen to have been the case in the community of the response there were the very fierce playwright larry kramer was a real leader in this conversation and in zimbabwe and in uganda in congo there were singers who are leaders in this conversations and other places or political leaders who didn't maybe could be almost anybody can write maybe somebody has to stand up and take this on it doesn't matter who it is it's just long as one person carries in his her system. kelly and i think what's going to eventually happen as far as in our community is that we need to start letting young people and even young people just people in general understand the power of their voice because eventually was going to happen is that. the new media is going to be the cell phone ok because as they see things put the video you know because now cell phones you

could upload photos directly to youtube all these different things is that now they have the power to tell the story. as more people living with hiv step forward to tell their stories we will no longer be able to ignore them and pretend we are safe the conversation must be taken to the schools inside the homes and throughout the community to eradicate the myths and fears that feed this preventable disease. today african-americans account for fifty percent of all new h i v infections every year unless we start talking to each other we will become dependent on drugs to live. with succeeding generations. start the conversation.

in the elevated to the i still don't see. this synopsis. but the it's a. great. dad you see this is the scene. just like the thirteen colonies. still exists. inside still useless blasts thirteen percent of the united states stations price of fifty percent of patients just to show. how shocked. were you and me. by people she. did h.i.v.

how did you do to be noticed since before the shooting in the us press and people pianists underground labs hiding beneath the radios would you fall for. the african monkeys theory conflicts with my knowledge comes up with. the district's knowledge and if so with no fisa how to travel across borders just laid all out to look across borders if you want. to sit there you never see no plane to can identify with the law you can use business disease skills in the event of being to be killed this disease is significantly prevented from being ignorant can feel the ambivalent bulis may be different but we suffer the same she. sees you are is the name of the game was dirty.

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