More Life Festival sheds light on AIDS education

Dawn ShepardÂ’s prison sentence saved her life.

Shepard, originally from New York, caught federal charges for drug dealing and was sentenced to nearly a decade in prison. During prison processing in 1990, she was given an HIV test and found out she was positive.

“Back when I was tested, AIDS was a gay thing,” Shepard said. “I was too cute to have AIDS.”

Shepard shared her story, which included getting onto a drug regimen while in prison and being released determined to prevent other women from falling into the same trap of drugs and sex, at the More Life Festival Town Hall Meeting on May 21.

The meeting, at the East St. Paul Baptist Church off Oak Grove Road West, was free and open to the public. It was just one of more than 60 events scheduled during the inaugural More Life Festival, a collaboration of Fort WorthÂ’s three AIDS service organizations and the Fort Worth Opera.

Within Tarrant County, an estimated 10,000 people are infected with HIV, which causes AIDS, and one-third of those people donÂ’t know they are infected and could be spreading the virus, according to More Life statistics.

Health disparities are common throughout the entire health care realm, but the meeting focused on the disparities within HIV and AIDS cases. Two epidemiologists sat on a panel with Shepard to explain that minorities, and especially African-American women, are making up a disproportionate number of HIV diagnoses.

Although African-Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population in 2005, they accounted for 49 percent of AIDS cases in the country that year, said Raquel Qualls-Hampton, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the UNT Health Science Center School of Public Health.

“It’s not the same disease it was in 1985,” Qualls-Hampton said.

When HIV and AIDS emerged, more than 20 years ago, it was seen primarily in gay white communities. However, of women who are diagnosed, African-American women account by far for the most new cases, she said.

Jeffery Green, an epidemiology specialist for Tarrant County Public Health, pointed out that the amount of HIV in the blood reaches an extreme high about three months after infection and then decreases, peaking again only when the person has had it about a decade or so.

This means that someone who is recently infected but is still healthy is contagious and can easily spread the disease through sexual contact or shared needles, he said. Focusing on those three months, when a person isnÂ’t aware theyÂ’re sick, is a challenge, he said.

“We have three months to change your behavior,” Green said. “By the time it hits, the damage is done.”

Steve Dutton, president and CEO of the Samaritan House, one of the collaborating partners for the More Life Festival, said although AIDS continues to be in the public consciousness, itÂ’s largely focused on the disease on other continents, like Africa and Asia. In less developed areas, people are still dying quickly because they are not being treated with the drugs widely available in the United States, he said.

“We’ve let the disease become even more prevalent here because we’ve been focused on it elsewhere,” he said.

Donald Terrell, board president of the Tarrant County AIDS Interfaith Network, another collaborating partner, said unless someone is tested for HIV, they may never know they are sick until they develop AIDS. However, AIDS has symptoms that are similar to other health conditions, from colds to cancer, and may be misdiagnosed or go untreated if no health care is sought, he said.

“Due to the stigma of the disease, people are very hesitant to get tested, especially in the high risk groups,” he said.

Education about AIDS is becoming difficult because while there is lots of federal funding going toward the disease in other countries, funding in the United States is relatively flat and often must be focused on abstinence-only education, he said.

“Almost everything now, almost 100 percent, is geared toward medical treatment instead of sexual education focused on prevention,” he said.

Contact Bassett at ebassett@bizpress.net

The More Life Festival will run through June 8 and event listings can be found at  www.MoreLifeTexas.com