Miami Herald - October 13, 2005
Fred Tasker, ftasker@herald.com

Diana Wasserman-Rubin hadn't seen her favorite cousin, Luisito, in years. Her aunt kept putting her off, telling her he was too busy.

"Then he died," said Wasserman-Rubin, a Broward County commissioner. "My aunt said it was lupus. It wasn't. It was AIDS. And she took away my last chance of seeing him."

Her point: "Our Latino culture sweeps things under the rug. We have to change that if we're going to fight AIDS."

It was a major theme at a Wednesday press conference in Fort Lauderdale to publicize National Latino AIDS Awareness Day on Saturday.

"HIV and AIDS have a disproportionate impact on Latinos in the United States and in Florida," said Thomas Liberti, chief of the HIV/AIDS bureau of the Florida Department of Health. "The stigma on AIDS among Latinos creates barriers to testing and treatment."

Liberti expressed hope Florida's new programs of testing and treating Hispanics can achieve the same decrease in HIV cases it has among blacks. In June, Florida Secretary of Health John Agwunobi announced new HIV diagnoses dropped by 24 percent among the state's black men, 36 percent among black women.

"We can do the same thing with Hispanics," Liberti said.

STRUGGLE EXPECTED

It will be a struggle, he acknowledged. In fact, AIDS appears to have increased since 2000 among the state's Hispanics. They make up 17 percent of Florida's adult population, but their share of AIDS cases grew from 14 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2004, a Florida Department of Health study says.

"In 2004," the study says, "the reported AIDS rate per 100,000 among Hispanic men was 73.5, more than double that for whites (32.4). Among Hispanic women the rate was 19.3 per 100,000, more than triple that for whites (6.0)."

But Liberti said at least part of the apparent increase isn't real -- it's because the increased testing is finding a bigger percentage of existing cases.

State testing of Hispanics soared 79 percent between 2000 and 2004, he said. So even though the testing found more cases of AIDS, the rate of positive tests actually fell, from 1.9 percent to 1.6 percent of those tested.

"I'm hoping the numbers will plateau for a couple of years, then drop," he said.

OPTIMISM

Another reason for optimism, Liberti said, is that, while Hispanics make up 17 percent of the state's population, they make up 29 percent of patients being helped by the state's $90-million-a-year AIDS Drug Assistance Program.

It runs pharmacies around the state to provide up to 56 anti-HIV drugs to those who can't afford them.

The program serves 5,000 patients in Miami-Dade County and 3,000 in Broward, he said.

But others described the difficulties of fighting AIDS among Hispanics in South Florida.

Reach 2010, a Florida International University program that sends counselors to urge the most vulnerable to be tested, recently lost 52 percent of its federal funding, said Josie Bacallao, executive director of Hispanic Unity, one of the groups working with the FIU program.

"We go after the young and men who have sex with men," she said.

"We find out where they go and we go there -- fingernail salons, churches, supermarkets, nightclubs. We discuss the issues, give them condoms and urge them to get tested."

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