PREVENT: CELL PHONE SOAP OPERAS TO DELIVER SAFE-SEX MESSAGE

A nurse educator at Rutger's University's College of Nursing is piloting a unique method of spreading the message of safe sex: cell phone soap operas. Yep, you heard right. According to an article by the Associated Press, the purpose is "to use short videos to go beyond pamphlets on safe sex and deliver the message to women who might otherwise tune it out."

The article goes on to explain that Rachel Jones developed this education campaign using professional actors and scripts based on focus groups with women in Newark and Jersey City. She filmed a series of 12 "soap opera vignettes" using a grant from a Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey. She also received a $2MM grant from the National Institutes of Health to test the effectiveness of the campaign.

Jones said, "Women who watched the first pilot were getting upset, angry, exacerbated.....Women really saw themselves in that video. We're really resonating with urban contemporary themes that we believe are relevant to women.......What we believe will happen is that knowledge alone is not effective at changing behaviors.. We believe that women in the community will so identify with heroines in the story their own behaviors will change as well."

Rachel Jones

Women in the federal study will watch the 20-minute episodes on their cell phones. Their risk-reduction behavior will be measured against a control group that will receive text messages urging condom use, but no video. A total of 250 women will participate.


The scripts feature "nitty gritty stories of risk and risk reduction" that women can identify with, she said, adding that cell phone viewing ensures privacy and offers the viewer the chance to watch again and again as desired.

Jones has dedicated her career to reducing HIV/AIDS among young, urban Black and Latina women, the two ethnic groups with the highest levels of infection. Part of her focus for this campaign is to hopefully change behavior among these groups of women.

"I had very bright, wonderful patients who would come to me again and again with sexually transmitted infections," she said. She said the women understood that they were being exposed to HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy, but engaged in unprotected sex anyway; even those who knew they weren't in monogamous relationships didn't insist their partners wear condoms."We have to normalize condom use," she said.

The plan is if the soap opera campaign is effective, Jones and her team will dedicate their efforts to mass distributing the DVDs with the soap opera videos. We look forward to positive results from the campaign. Should more women adopt the idea for consistent condom usage, that would drastically reduce the rate at which HIV is transmitted, especially among Black and Hispanic women.

For further information on this new campaign and a description of the actual soap opera, check out the full article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28482386/

NEWSFLASH: HIV Can Penetrate a Woman's Healthy Genital Skin

In a recent article in HealthDay News, U.S. researchers explained that they have identified a new route of male-to-female transmission of HIV - a route in which HIV can travel through the healthy genital skin of a female to reach immune cells in just four hours.

Prior to this discovery, it had been believed that the normal lining of the vaginal tract was an effective barrier to HIV during sex, due to the idea that the large virus could not penetrate the tissue. Unfortunately however, researchers at Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University found that HIV can penetrate normal, healthy genital tissue to a point where it can get to immune cells and infect them.

In their experiment, the researchers were able to track the viruses, using flourescent tags, as they penetrated the outermost lining of the female genital tract in female human tissue obtained through hysterectomy and in animal models.

This finding highlights even further the need for consistent latex condom usage, given that healthy, unbroken genital tissue is not a true barrier to the virus. The good news is, if this finding is confirmed in future studies and research, it could help in the development of new microbicides and vaccines to protect women against HIV. Given that women now make up approximately 50% of all persons living around the world with HIV, finding more methods of prevention have become more critical than ever.

Source: Yahoo! News

EDUCATE: HIV/AIDS & AFRICAN AMERICANS - PART I

The one ethnic group that is most severely affected by HIV/AIDS in the U.S. is.....African-Americans. Since the beginning of the epidemic, Blacks have accounted for about 42% of the AIDS cases diagnosed in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Currently, African-Americans make up roughly 12% of the U.S. population, but account for approximately 50% of the diagnosed HIV/AIDS cases.

In 2005, the rate of AIDS diagnoses for Black adults and adolescents was 10 times the rate for whites and almost 3 times the rate for Hispanics. To fully understand these disproportionate statistics, we're going to dig a little deeper into the numbers as well as take a look at some root causes.

HIV/AIDS & African-American Men

Within the African-American population, men represent 64% of AIDS cases. In 2005, the rate of AIDS diagnoses for Black men was 8 times the rate for white men. Furthermore, looking at the different ethnic populations of male adults and adolescents living with HIV/AIDS, Black men made up 41%.

Source: www.cdc.gov/hiv

In 2006, 40% of the men newly infected with HIV were Black.

In regards to methods of transmission among African-American men, Men who have Sex with Men (MSM) accounted for 45% of Black men living with AIDS in 2006. Injection drug use (IDU) accounted for roughly 27%, and high-risk heterosexual contact accounted for about 19%.

HIV/AIDS & African-American Women

Seeing as men represent 64% of the AIDS cases within the African-American population, women represent 36%. In 2005, the rate of AIDS diagnoses for Black women was nearly 23 times the rate of white women. Looking at different ethnic groups living with HIV/AIDS in 2005, Black women made up 64%.

Source: www.cdc.gov/hiv

AIDS is now the leading cause of death among black women ages 25-34.

HIV/AIDS & Youth and Children

Of the individuals under the age of 25 whose diagnosis of HIV/AIDS was made during 2001-2004 in the 33 states with HIV reporting, 61% were Black. Even more disturbing, recent estimates have found that Blacks (non-Hispanic) ages 19-24 are approximately 20 times more likely to be infected with HIV than young adults in any other racial group. According to the international AIDS charity AVERT:

The overall infection rate among young Black people is 4.9 per 1,000 people, as compared to 0.22 per 1,000 people in all other racial groups.

Thanks to new treatment and the implementation of government prevention guidelines, the HIV rate among children and infants is now quite low. However, of the few infants that are still being born with HIV, a substantial number are African-American. Of the 135 infants diagnosed in 2006, 69% were Black.

So now the question becomes: Why is the HIV infection and AIDS diagnoses so disproportionately high in the African-American community? We'll examine some specific risk factors and barriers to prevention in Part II.

Post Sources: CDC.gov, Avert.org