Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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San Francisco Examiner - December 10, 2002
Alison Soltau, Special to The Examiner
At the same time, black residents were not taking advantage of available life-prolonging treatment and had the lowest survival rate of any ethnic group, according to the report issued last week by the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
The City has 27,923 residents living with HIV or AIDS, the highest level ever. New therapies are prolonging people's lives, but that has led to complacency about contracting HIV, experts say.
"They think, 'If I get infected, you guys got drugs. I'll take some of those drugs,'" said James Loyce, Jr., deputy director of health for AIDS programs.
Those who are infected may not get care for reasons such as distrust of health institutions and poverty.
Black women have been disproportionately infected, making up 8 percent of the overall female population in The City, but fully 44 percent of all women infected with HIV. That is due in part, Loyce said, to some black men having sex with other men in jail and then passing the virus on to their female partners on the outside.
"Some come out of the prison system and continue the behavior but would never, ever, hear a message (aimed at gay men), because they don't identify that way," Loyce said.
To try to get the message across, Loyce recently introduced Ms. Ellie, a poster campaign featuring a wise matriarch dispensing sound, old-fashioned advice targeted at both men and women.
"Honey, your secrets could kill you," she intones. "Know your HIV status. Get tested."
San Francisco AIDS Foundation leaders believe black men in the Tenderloin are having survival sex in exchange for drugs, and so recently launched a poster campaign featuring semi-naked black men exchanging rocks of coke on the verge of a sexual encounter.
"Fair Exchange Ain't No Robbery: Is HIV part of your Deal?" it says.
"They are not the type of people who move to The City from the Midwest and say, "I'm out and I'm loud, I'm gay and I'm proud," foundation spokesman William Bland said. "They are having sex for substance use and financial reward."
The Black Coalition on AIDS' theory is that openly gay blacks are moving to the country's gay capital for sanctuary but realizing on arrival that the grass isn't always pinker.
"It's expensive to live here and the kids aren't prepared for that and they are drawn into things like prostitution and drug use," spokesman Daniel Hlad said.
The major tool in fighting AIDS is high-intensity advanced antiretroviral therapy (HAART), a cocktail of drugs that in many cases has been shown to prolong life by staving off the HIV virus by reducing the viral load in the bloodstream.
The survey also broke down the survival rate for various ethnic groups. Latinos fared best, with an 80 percent survival rate for those with AIDS for the 60 months between 1996 and 2001; 77 percent of whites survived; 76 percent of Asians survived; and 70 percent of blacks survived.
The annual report said blacks fared the worst in part because they are less likely to use antiretroviral therapies, but the full reason for the disparity was not well understood.
The Department of Public Health plans to pump $270,000 into three different programs to try to increase participation of blacks in HIV treatment, the Health Commission was told last week.
E-mail: asoltau@sfindependent.com
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