Health Advocates Call for HIV Tests for Asians

Left to right: Dr. Elisa I. Choi; Dr. Michael T. Wong; Amit Dixit, community activist; Carol Gomez of MataHari; and Jacob Smith Yang of MAP for Health. (Courtesy photo: MAP FOR HEALTH for indianewengland.com)

The following article is from IndiaNewEngland.com.

Carol Gomez isn't afraid of getting an HIV test - not even in front of a crowd.

At a press conference last month about AIDS awareness among Asian Americans, Gomez, director of the nonprofit organization MataHari: Eye of the Day, took the test with Jacob Smith Yang, executive director of Massachusetts Asian and Pacific Islanders (MAP) for Health, to show how simple the test has become - and how imperative it is for at-risk Asians to get tested.

A small gathering of reporters and health advocates watched as a doctor wearing a white lab coat took a small swab-like stick and rubbed it inside the mouths of Gomez and Smith Yang.

"Tastes like chicken," joked Gomez, after the test, which took no more than seconds to administer.

"It must've been the flavored one," replied Dr. Elisa I. Choi, the doctor who gave the test, with a smile. Sort of like a pregnancy test, the oral HIV test takes about 20 minutes to give a result (which was not shared with the crowd, of course) by reading the appearance strips that appear after it is developed in a solution.

Unlike the HIV test of the past, it now requires no needles or the previous two-week wait time for a result.

The demonstration was used as a light-hearted ice-breaker to a serious topic. An estimated 7,739 Asians and Pacific Islanders in America were diagnosed with AIDS in December of 2005.

While that number is just one percent of all HIV cases in the United States, there is a larger concern for Dr. Choi and other health advocates.

The number of Asians being diagnosed with the disease is rising. Between 2001 and 2005, the number of Asians and Pacific Islanders known living with AIDS increased by 54 percent - the largest increase for any minority group.

"HIV/AIDS is a significant problem in the Asian Pacific Islander community," said Choi, who is also a director of MAP for Health, the health advocacy nonprofit organization that hosted the May 15, 2008, event.

During the press conference, community activist Amit Dixit put a human face to the statistics.

In 1994 Dixit was diagnosed as HIV positive while in his twenties.

His story began when he arrived to the United States from India at age 4 with his parents on Christmas day. As Dixit grew to be a young adult, he realized he was gay and lived with "intense guilt" about his double-life that he hid from his parents. He was "terrified," he said, of being caught hanging out in Boston's so-called gay neighborhoods or in gay clubs.

But soon his double-life caught up with him.

After he became ill and sought medical treatment, a doctor gave him an AIDS test, which at the time took two weeks to show a result.

"Waiting was excruciatingly long," he said.

Finally, his doctor, a woman from Pakistan, gave him the news: He was HIV positive. "You perhaps have 12 to 18 months to live," she told him.

Then came the question: Should she tell Dixit's mother about the result?

Dixit decided she should. "There was no more hiding," he said.

But, in fact, there was more hiding for his parents. "We're not telling anybody," is what Dixit recalled his father saying upon hearing the news his son was HIV positive.

Since that time, however, new drugs have allowed him to live long past the original prognosis. And, just as important, he said, he has been able to tell people without guilt or shame of who he is.

"Just being able to say that I'm a gay HIV-positive man has been a long journey," said Dixit, who is now involved in the Massachusetts Area South Asian Lambda Association.

The kind of stigma surrounding AIDS and being gay that Dixit faced by his family is faced by many other Asian Americans, said Choi.
That, combined with the so-called model-minority myth that Asians are immune to such things, makes it difficult to raise awareness about AIDS, its prevention, and its control among Asians, said Choi.

The mere fact that people generally don't view AIDS as a problem among Asians hampers healthcare workers from getting proper resources to help the population, she said.

Another problem, she said, is the many reports and studies about HIV and AIDS don't include statistics about Asians, or they are lumped together in the "other" category.

A 2007 article in the Journal of Urban Health dissected the statistics for the population, showing that its diagnosis rate is increasing faster than for other racial groups. Choi said the attention given to the report - which is titled "Let's Not Ignore a Growing HIV Problem for Asians and Pacific Islanders in the U.S." - underscores her concern about getting the word out about AIDS to Asians.

"What was damning was that there was no press about it," she said.

Source: INDIAnewEngland.com

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