Bay Windows - June 7, 2007
Nikki Chase

"There is a crisis and that crisis has yet to be truly addressed," said moderator Stella Safo, a first-year medical student at Harvard and a member of the Harvard Medical School AIDS Action Initiative.

Fifteen people attended HIV/AIDS Crisis in Black America: Answering the Call, held at Harvard Medical School on June 1. Phill Wilson, the founder and executive director of the Black AIDS Institute, led the conference along with guest speakers Valerie E. Stone, director of the Woman's HIV/AIDS Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and Bisola O. Ojikutu, director of the South Africa HIV/AIDS Programs at Harvard.

The conference addressed the domestic AIDS crisis and encouraged future doctors to become engaged in the cause.

Wilson spoke first, rising from his seat to reveal a T-shirt reading "Got AIDS?"

"AIDS is a black disease," he said. "Nobody wants to talk about that, nobody wants to own that, nobody wants to acknowledge that and it's killing us."

Wilson called AIDS the nation's defining health issue and said there is particular need to pay attention to fighting AIDS among black communities in the United States.

African Americans make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, according to the 2000 census. However, they account for 49 percent of new HIV/AIDS diagnoses in 2005, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And in 2002, HIV was the third leading cause of death for African Americans ages 25-34.

"The good news is, AIDS is a battle we can win," Wilson said. "I think this is a message that gets missed. We get caught up in the hopelessness of it, we get caught up in the constructs of managing the epidemic, we get confused with managing the disease and the individual and we think the best thing we can do about the disease is to manage it as well and quite frankly, managing the epidemic isn't working for us and I don't know if it's working anywhere ... Our role in the epidemic is not to manage it, it's to end it."

Wilson emphasized "undermining the epidemic" by creating a national plan that gets all organizations involved by putting AIDS at the top of their agenda. "Yes, HIV is a health issue, but it's more than a health issue, it is a civil rights issue, it is an urban renewal issue, it is an economic issue, it is a justice issue," he said.

Wilson said the most effective way to lower new diagnoses is to increase the percentage of people who know their HIV status as well as the percentage of people receiving early treatment. In order to do this, the sigma surrounding AIDS and HIV must be eliminated. "Nobody should be afraid to get tested because of stigma," said Wilson. "Nobody should be afraid to seek treatment because of stigma."

HIV testing is becoming more routine and is being offered during some physical examinations, which will help "eliminate the barriers" of getting tested, he said.

The first steps are being taken, but Wilson said the United States government had an obligation to become involved as well.

In May, President Bush announced a five-year, $30 billion plan to prevent AIDS/HIV in Africa. "The president used terms like 'compassion,' he used terms like 'responsibility,' he used terms like 'leadership' and all of these are important terms that should be applied to our role in fighting the global epidemic," he said. "Sadly, our administration does not seem to be able to use the same words to understand those same concepts when it comes to the domestic AIDS epidemic."

Stone spoke of the need for medical students to become the second generation of AIDS doctors, committed to fighting the cause in the United States, but the stigma that plagues the disease has spread to the doctors who treat the disease as well.

"You're in medical school and you have an opportunity to be a cosmetic surgeon," Wilson said. "You're doing tummy tucks and they're outpatient procedures and you get a lot of money for that. There are TV shows that are about doing that and there's no stigma associated with that. Or you decide to be a brain surgeon and your mother gets to say 'My child is a brain surgeon.' On the other hand, you get to be an HIV doctor and now your mother doesn't even say you're a doctor."

Ojikutu, a second generation AIDS doctor herself, agreed that the stigma for doctors is real, saying her mother has never referred to her as an AIDS doctor, but rather a doctor that travels internationally. But, as more doctors become involved in the fight against AIDS, the stigma will slowly begin to dissipate and Ojikutu encouraged minority doctors, especially, to become involved.

"In black America, we can't expect anyone to throw us a lifeline," Wilson said. "We've already waited too long for the calvary to arrive to save us. We have to save ourselves."

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