Health department reaching out to African refugees on issue of HIV/AIDS

SALT LAKE CITY — One afternoon this summer, Heather Bush took her message and her basket of condoms to a women's health workshop for African refugees.

"Women are powerful," she told the group. "If we protect ourselves, then we can also protect our children, and also the men."

Bush, who works as an education and training coordinator for the Utah Department of Health, is trying to get the message out about HIV/AIDS. "We should encourage each other to be tested, to use protection and to talk to our partners," she told the women.

This outreach to Utah's African refugees is part of the health department's effort to contact "underserved" communities. It is a delicate mission, a balance of hoping for compliance but also knowing that no community wants outsiders coming in to tell them what to do.

"Our approach now is to start to build relationships with those communities, to build trust, to ask them what they want. We want to do it in a culturally sensitive way," she says. Some of the African communities in Utah, she said, are "tired of being stigmatized that HIV is an African thing and that because they're from Africa they must be at risk."

The HIV rate in some of the African countries now represented in Utah is twice or even six times what it is in the United States — for example, more than 4 percent of people ages 15 to 49 in the Democratic Republic of Congo are estimated to have HIV, compared to 0.6 percent in the United States, according to the CIA World Factbook. In Somalia, on the other hand, the HIV rate is only 0.5 percent.

Of the 908 refugees tested by the health department soon after their arrival in 2009, seven tested positive for HIV. Because the number is so small, the department does not reveal the home country or even continent of these refugees, says health program specialist Gerrie Dowdle.

The danger is not that refugees might have brought the disease with them but that they might contract it here. The myth among some refugees, Bush says, is that "Americans don't have HIV, so I can have sex with as many women as I want."

Bush hopes to bring her message about HIV testing and safe sex to more refugees — to community events or even into their homes. She wants them to know how quick and easy the HIV test is — just a matter of a finger prick or rubbing a swab along the gums — and that a positive result is kept confidential.

e-mail: jarvik@desnews.com