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Sharing Knowledge, Sharing Health

As we find ourselves in the third decade of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the disease is increasingly in the news, particularly as a global phenomenon. This past July, the 14th International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Spain, brought together more than 15,000 scientists, activists, policymakers and people living with HIV to share research findings, innovative interventions and cautious optimism in the face of fearsome epidemiological projections.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) 40 million people today are living with HIV/AIDS around the globe; 45 million more will become infected with HIV by the end of this decade. At the end of 2001, the WHO reported that South Africa is the country with the most people living with HIV in the world, around 5 million; India, with 3.9 million cases, is second, and the country with the highest number in the Asia Pacific region. In China, according to the joint United Nations initiative on global HIV/AIDS, 850,000 people were estimated to be living with the disease. According to China’s Health Ministry, reported HIV infections rose by over 67 percent in the first six months of 2001, compared with the previous year. And most recently, reports of “AIDS villages” in Central China, where rural communities routinely donate blood for money, have some of the highest localized rates of HIV in the world at 80 percent and exponential increases in the numbers of children orphaned by AIDS. It is ironic that it should take mainstream reports of the HIV/AIDS situation in the Asia Pacific region to augment our efforts stateside to educate Asian Pacific American communities and to provide services to APAs living with HIV.

Historically, APAs in the United States have not registered on the HIV/AIDS radar, a struggle not atypical for APAs in other health and socio-economic contexts. It was against this backdrop that grassroots efforts gave rise to community-based organizations, the oldest of which, the Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center in San Francisco, was established almost 16 years ago.

In the mid-1980s, APAs too were dying of AIDS, but we were the casualty of the omnipresent, model minority mythology, which said that APAs were not considered at risk. In fact there were articles that claimed that APAs as a racial group were somehow immune to HIV since so few cases, relative to other communities, were being reported. Thus — incredibly — having sex with Asians was considered “safe sex.” For the record, what we know to be true is that APAs were not and are not immune to HIV. The reality, of course, is that men, women and children of all ages, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, gender identities and demographic categories contract HIV. Indeed, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, APAs together with other people of color now represent the majority of new reported AIDS cases and of people living with AIDS in the United States. Furthermore, half of all new infections occur among people under 25.

Over the last 16 years, it has been the charge of community-based organizations in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Toronto, et al, together with national public policy allies like Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum and the National Minority AIDS Council, to advocate for more accurate data collection and to make the case for resources to be allocated to APA communities for quality, integrated, culturally meaningful HIV programming, ranging from prevention education and testing to case management and treatment advocacy, from mental health to psychiatric and primary care.

One critical priority in which we have made headway over the last few years has been access to and involvement in HIV/AIDS research. There has been a steady increase, albeit a trickle, of scientific initiatives where APAs are the focus of multi-year, federally-funded research studies, a legitimizing indicator of how far we as a community have come. APA researchers, themselves an isolated group, are partnering more and more with APA communities to develop more appropriate strategies to prevent HIV, more effective medications to treat HIV, and more culturally relevant interventions to support people living with HIV. However, what has been lacking is the opportunity to showcase these collaborations, to forge a comprehensive research agenda that highlights critical unmet needs, and to examine the current state of HIV/AIDS research as it relates to APAs in a global context.

From Nov. 15 to 17, the Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center will host the first-ever Asian & Pacific Islander Summit on HIV/AIDS Research — A&PI SHARE — co-sponsored by the UC San Francisco, School of Medicine, and in collaboration with the Office of AIDS Research, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health & Human Services and community partners from the nonprofit, for-profit and federal government sectors, including the American Foundation for AIDS Research, Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Gilead Sciences. Scientists and service providers, people living with HIV/AIDS and public policy makers, delegates from China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Philippines, Vietnam and other Asian countries will be present.

John Manzon-Santos has been executive director of the Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center since 1997.

The Asian & Pacific Islander Summit on HIV/AIDS Research will take place Nov. 15 – 17 at the Marriott Hotel in Oakland. For more information call 415-292-3400 or go to www.apiwellness.org.