Outreach Workers Battle AIDS Denial on St. Lucie Streets

A year ago, statistics showed St. Lucie County had the highest HIV rate in Florida for black women and the sixth-highest for white women. But as HIV prevention outreach staff from In the Image of Christ work on the streets at night, offering condoms and free oral swab HIV screening to residents, they hear a lot of denial. These workers say denial, ignorance, and refusal to talk about HIV keeps infection rates high in the county, despite prevention efforts.

"People don't perceive themselves as being at risk because they fit into a certain class, or because they're not a sex worker or because they're not on drugs," said Dawn Jones, HIV/AIDS program coordinator for St. Lucie County Health Department. "It's destroying the community." If you do not think you are at risk, you do not change your behavior and protect yourself, whether through abstinence or condoms and regular testing, she said.

Data show that heterosexual women of all races are at risk on the Treasure Coast, including an increasing number whose partners are men who surreptitiously have sex with men, Jones said.

Jones cited the high incarceration of males as partly explaining the high infection rate in the black community. "They were surviving in prison," she said. "Of course they don't want to admit that happened because they want to reclaim their manhood. So, they go back to their girlfriends or their wives."

"You've got people who still think you can get it by sitting on a toilet seat," said Olive Wedderburn, St. Lucie's representative on a state HIV prevention panel. Some teens think only vaginal sex is sex, and ironically put themselves at even greater risk by practicing anal sex, she said. The reality is that many teens are just not practicing abstinence, Wedderburn said.

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