Chicago Tribune - September 1, 2008

That, of course, is a good thing. Still, as any AIDS caseworker will remind you, prevention remains preferable to medication. That's a message that's becoming harder to transmit as the AIDS epidemic matures. Disease fatigue is partly to blame. Eternal vigilance, though necessary, is exhausting. Another culprit: a long-standing taboo-especially in the African-American community-toward talking about AIDS, condom use and safe sex.

But the problem is not going away. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that the annual HIV infection rate in the U.S. had, since the late 1990s, hovered between 55,000 and 58,500. That's far higher than the previous estimate of 40,000 infections per year. Better data and more sophisticated modeling led to the upward revision.

Gay and bisexual men accounted for 53 percent of the 56,300 estimated infections in 2006. And though African-Americans make up just 13 percent of the overall U.S. population, they accounted for 45 percent of the new infections. The infection rate of black Americans is seven times as high as the infection rate of white Americans.

If we are to break the sclerosis and roll back what has come to seem like an intractable infection rate, we'll have to employ not just money, but healthy measures of creativity, cleverness and moxie.

AIDS activists in India have been doing just that. A deeply conservative country, India is a place where talking openly about sex-even safe sex-is difficult. So in an effort to jump-start the conversation, activists recorded a cell phone ring tone-available for download-in which a professional musician sings "condom, condom." The campaign is buttressed by television, print, radio and movie ads. Launched Aug. 8, the ring tone was downloaded more than 60,000 times in its first dozen days in circulation.

The Black AIDS Institute's approach is slightly less cheeky. In conjunction with its effort to get 1 million black people tested for the disease by December, the institute has also set up a confidential online database where users can register their testing dates and AIDS status. The hope: that the mere act of tracking AIDS history will catalyze conversations between potential sexual partners about disease status, protection and condom use.

AIDS remains a scourge-especially among gay men and in the African-American community. Fighting that scourge will require us to employ not just cash and caregivers, but creativity as well.

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