Today, hundreds of high school students from the Galveston and Houston areas will take part in the third annual Black AIDS Awareness Day, an event sponsored by the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and timed to coordinate with national efforts to raise HIV/AIDS awareness among African Americans.

HIV/AIDS is a health crisis for blacks. Between 2000 and 2003, CDC reports the HIV/AIDS rates for black females were 19 times higher than rates for their white counterparts and five times those of Hispanic females. For black men, the HIV/AIDS rates were seven times higher than for white men and three times those of Hispanic men.

Shenequa Flucas, who works for the federally funded group SISTA (Sisters Informing Sisters About Topics on AIDS) in the Beaumont-Port Arthur area, will be a featured speaker at today's event. In 1997, 19-year-old Flucas had just had her second child when a doctor told her she was HIV-positive. At the time, Flucas wondered how she had acquired the disease "because you would hear in conversations about HIV being a gay, white man's disease." "I didn't sleep with anybody other than black men. I was not prostituting. I wasn't shooting drugs. I was saying, 'What happened?'" she recalled.

After months of denial, Flucas told her family and friends of her diagnosis. She began educating herself and others about HIV/AIDS through the Triangle AIDS Network. Now, her work with SISTA has Flucas going into the community and reaching out with prevention messages. "I may not change everybody, but if the words that come out of my mouth, if I can help anybody just to open up their eyes, that's my main concern," said Flucas, whose three children are HIV-negative.

Today's program at the university's Levin Hall at 10th and Market is free and will include free HIV testing.

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