Experts: Prevention key to stopping HIV

At the end of the day, when Nickie Bell packs up her information booth at a local health fair, she invariably has run out of pens and pencils scooped up by visitors. The same cannot be said for her basket of condoms.

“We’re not usually the people that folks want to come over to visit,” said Bell, a program manager with the AIDS Coalition of Coastal Texas. “When people come by (the booth) they just act uncomfortable or crack jokes about the condoms. They grab a (free) pencil and then get away quickly.”

For Bell, who attends many community events and speaks about HIV prevention at schools around the county, that reaction to the AIDS Coalition display is a nagging source of frustration.

“People will say, ‘Oh, I don’t need (condoms), I’m married,’ or ‘My kids aren’t having sex’,” said Bell. “Well, guess what. Kids are becoming more sexually active, around age 12-13, than ever before.”

That reticence to discuss safe sex is in jarring juxtaposition to the country’s rising tide of HIV infections — the virus that causes AIDS — and other common sexually transmitted diseases.

Medical experts and those who try to spread the word about abstinence or safe sex among youths say the nation is under the heels of a pandemic.

Safe-sex Counseling
Despite the major medical breakthroughs that have made the incurable disease much more manageable 25 years after AIDS was first identified, abstinence and practicing safe sex are still the only ways to prevent its spread.

At least 40,000 new HIV infections are reported in the United States each year.

In Galveston County, several agencies offer safe-sex counseling and have educational programs to target at-risk groups.

For example, the Galveston County Health District — which administers HIV/AIDS programs in Galveston, Brazoria and Matagorda counties — uses two programs for intervention and prevention of HIV or sexually transmitted diseases.

One program is dubbed RAPP — Real AIDS Prevention Program — aimed at African-American women and also men who have sex with men.

Outreach workers take the program from street corners to pool halls to community centers.

“The idea is to try to move people from one (opinion) to another,” said health district spokesman Kurt Koopmann.

If a person says he never uses condoms, workers talk to him one-on-one and try to get him to say he will use them sometimes, Koopmann said. If someone says he uses condoms all the time, outreach workers try to reinforce that.
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Condoms In Schools
The heath district’s other HIV risk-reduction and prevention program, Turning Point, is aimed at intravenous drug users.

The sessions, offered in 2005 to 627 residents in the three counties, typically are at drug treatment centers and include counseling to encourage an HIV test and educational films.

“We’re not allowed in the state to offer a needle-exchange program,” said Koopmann, “But we can instruct them how to sterilize their needles.”

Bell, with the AIDS Coalition, and other social agency workers interviewed by The Daily News agree that more educational counseling is paramount in school settings.They understand the need to talk about abstinence but say to avoid the topic of safe sex is a serious gamble.

School districts follow state guidelines on sex education. The Texas Education Code specifies that school districts must “present abstinence as the preferred choice of behavior for unmarried persons of school age, and devote more attention to abstinence than to any other behavior.”

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Teen Clinics
The Teen Health Center operates free clinics at several schools in the county in association with the University of Texas Medical Branch.

The clinics, which offer free medical treatments and confidential HIV testing to any school or college student up to age 22, are at Ball High School and Central and Weis middle schools in Galveston, at La Marque High School and at Blocker Middle School in Texas City. Only one of these clinics — at Ball High — offers a service through which a student, with a signed permission slip from a parent or guardian, can obtain a condom.

“Somehow, some people’s perception is that we’re only a sex or STD clinic, and we’re telling (students) to go out and have sex or make it easier for them,” said Richard Rupp of UTMB, the teen centers’ medical director. “But clinic visits related to STDs or pregnancy only represent about 2 percent of what we do. We promote healthy lifestyles with the goal of having students not miss school.”

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Focus On Education

School districts are forbidden to distribute condoms in connection with any instruction relating to human sexuality, which is another source of frustration for Bell, especially when she makes a presentation about HIV prevention in schools. Bell said she can hand out pamphlets about HIV protection but is not allowed to demonstrate the use of a condom.

“It’s very important for us to do this (HIV prevention),” Bell said. “You can’t sugarcoat talking about sex.

“Younger kids are trying oral sex, and they don’t consider it like having ‘real’ sex. And it’s more common than parents would like to think. Parents need to be educated to educate the children.”

A study in the June issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine indicates that teenage girls face harsh realities when it comes to practicing safe sex.

According to the study, about 40 percent of girls between 14 and 17 reported being threatened or pressured by their partners into having sex, potentially increasing their risk of acquiring a sexually transmitted disease.

The study involved 279 teenage girls in Indiana. Nearly 90 percent were black. Among all participants, 37.6 percent said they had unwanted sex because they feared their partner would get angry if denied sex.

Unwanted sex was also more often linked to situations when condoms were not frequently used or if either partner used alcohol or marijuana.

With these kinds of social pressures evident in today’s society — and the fact that African-Americans now face the highest risk of contracting HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases — county residents who are HIV-positive interviewed by The Daily News agree that educators and parents must do a better job of hammering home the message about abstinence and safe sex.

“What’s worse — to practice safe sex or face the possibility of dying of AIDS, just from one mistake?” asked Galveston resident Kenny Gray, who has been HIV positive since 1989. “We’ve got to preach that practicing safe sex is the most sensible thing for people to do. Their lives could be at stake.”

For More Information Contact:
Kurt Koopmann
Public Information Officer
Galveston County Health District
409-938-2211 or 409-392-0007
kkoopman@gchd.org