i'm really excited by what i've seen here at m m r t i and what you young people are doing here i've seen you use learning how to create a database to do research on the internet how to conduct data entry and to learn about event organizing and mailing and communication to businesses in the community i also have personally experienced your very professional film studio and all of the equipment and the set up and i can see that all of you young people have been trained to to do your work in a very professional manner both both behind the camera and in front of the camera so i think the skills that young people are learning here at m m r t i are very high quality and i would encourage other young people to come here and learn more about the program and to sign up and to become part of this great learning experience my name is roxanne karami i'm an acting assistant professor at the university of washington in the department of medicine and i'm also an epidemiologist with public health seattle in king county in the h i v s t d section of public health hi my name is any and i'm the director of prevention education and community relations for life long which was previously a lifelong a lines i've been in the field in washington state for going on about a decade as director of prevention services for evergreen wellness advocates and we've recently combined forces thank you so my name is muhammad ali and i africa community health advocate in this area and i've been doing that f very interesting  ethiopia and especially the numbers so here which compares to any others so i took this very important maybe to come together and talk about it and maybe there is something we're missing here so yeah and raise issues especially stuff you can issues and use media and technology to get the issues sold and i am happy to be part of this discussion thank you years practicing there was a young ethiopian young lady i remember that was in two thousand and she came in my office in downtown now after i discussed her symptom and see where she is she was just beautiful beautiful young  e who's been fighting alone and here is our energy in a sense of this disease and beyond front and to see a culture that's very tight and see how we start the dialogue and we can be you can be anything if we unified but also respect the individual thinking fear that they have the stigma you mention and the consequence of the stigma so and also l her guidance in a sense you know we can beat this together and so she survived and she has three beautiful kids and one of the kids now is you think terms are great and so this can be we can do it together  can hope each other and we are great people we have a sense oh love unconditional love wolf which other but we really don't know where to start stoke and the source we have here in the united states we have n master's when she was doing research on the western medical practices and how it's how ethiopians adopted the western practices and relationship to s t d and aids and so that conversation is out there in the cloud it's out there you can look at it and i did hear and so that's one of things with a lot of topics were talked about i mean talk about africans after americans immigrants the whole culture language there's lots of things and one of the sky sions i go back here with sophia and my we talked about as there was a book that dr board graves had written dr board gray's was in the military and he came down aids and he started doing research and found paperwork that the u s government from their cancer research developed to aids that's the claim and so and there's patents out there for both the cure and the cause of aids and that information is not really out there a lot of people know about it and i conspiracy theorist but as far as what the aids in the website you said that you're a single person and so the hold ice challenge that was really done by one person a mother of a brother who found out that he had the  disease and so the family really kind of came together and figured out an idea and it was really the mom that came out with the idea of the ice bucket challenge and so i challenge you that don't think of yourself as a single person you can do it you can because it will take a little bit of help but if you have the passion and the idea there are people in this room that will help you make the website i'm personally one that can work with you on that you have facebook we have i worked with a side to create a website what he did is  tech workshop a couple of years ago and so that website still out there and so there's what resources that you have and capabilities where you can be a point person to be a game changer you know so don't think of yourself as you can do it you can do it this positive energy something that we can easy to forget however a human being seems to have a media when it comes to those kind of things but we can't we have to keep in mining them that this is something that's will not go away hoping that we will we will not open minded and i think if we target those folks to become the spokes person or the advocacy for that i think we may have a little chance of going through that when we college graduate from the community i think people will have a better understanding for that that's one part of it the second part of it is the religious leaders the moms as well role play a role bill to us is i mean solomon have to give him credit for coming out i wish we could have many more people come out like that and i feel we have a better understanding for solomon for a long time he was by the professionals doctors all about to start tara to begin to hope for our own families given them understanding i remember i was the first african to support the gay ma city i'm very well in the county first time i support to bring him into the mosque saying that this is the community it was a lot of it to my community however i mean that's a decision that i took it but people overcome that people overcom praying that people have it but those who already have it i hope that they will come out and i think for bringing this issue over and over over he's a model of the community i really appreciate to be a part of this and this is and i have to thank solomon for the graduate that are doing i'd like to remark on something that solomon brought up and that is the fact that in the african community people generally are diagnosed much later than their u s counterparts particularly because in king county hiv epidemic here is predominantly an epidemic among men who have sex with men and there have been a lot of prevention messages directed that community over the years about having protected sex and being hiv tested and taking care of yourself and the community responded to that and now we don't see people going as late in their illness and then being diagnosed as was the case previously but we're still seeing that in the african community so in king county we know that among men who have sex with men about twenty five percent of people who are diagnosed with hiv go on to be diagnosed with aids within one year but when we look at that among heterosexuals which is predominantly among african born people in king county that number is more it up around fifty percent or sometime in some years sixty percent so what we often see when people are diagnosed with hiv is that they're diagnosed in the hospital because they're very very ill and that's not good for them and it's not good for the community because the longer people go before they're diagnosed the less able they are to protect their partners to protect their unborn children if they're women who are of childbearing age it's very important to get people tested and when we're missing the opportunity to have people tested earlier it sort of multiplying the problem within the community so that's where we have to really try to do more work you know by working with you treatment improved you know a great deal you know when i started my medication i was lucky  before absolutely you know our organization does two fold and i want to comment on some of the things that you both brought up is one we do medical case management and we also do highly targeted outreach in prevention for specific communities and absolutely within king county probably seventy five percent of all diagnoses are within the m s m community and there has been often a dearth of information and communication to the some of the lower prioritize communities  and as a result of that we do see that there is a lot more late term diagnoses than then there ought to be especially when we have opportunities for testing and and treatment many individuals don't necessarily know the resources or where to go to to be able to get access to things like the early intervention programs which helps assistant vigils through those medications so it's one of the most important things that we can probably do is disseminate communication and information about what those resources are and where to get tested and how to get tested thanks so for me i would have really started with it was really touching when you say that if i knew what i know now i would have tested earlier or the beginning so which means that  what you're hearing from the media or from the scientists from there but the mileage is from all those everybody so i think our communities what they need is starting from scratch telling them that this is empowering them and giving them that knowledge then the person when they know that this is a really serious issue with them or with the community because if i pick my community  other people or father so this kind of things so we need that education piece which really creates the person the community and then influences behaviors and also now they could be part of the solution of questions which education comes because not hiv even have a tights or any other disease even diabetes that's a term of really these communities they have other issues uncountable they're dealing with other unheard of challenges in their life so we need them to be part of the solution of their own self of their own family of the then to there that will be real the education comes first and then get i mean if you have individuals from community who knows their community who have the knowledge and expertise tool to advocate the issue i mean they don't often get that opportunity i mean you have to rely on other organization not the moon is not the only i mean issues our community faces you know you can talk about diet you can talk about justice you can discuss so many different issues where we look a lot i mean are we are behind so the most important question is like to begin we know the issue i mean in america and you are like twenty percent of the bullish you know who is and hiv in fact they don't even know so like the testing i mean we are not only the people who are not testing like when you have twenty percent of individuals hold who are who live which i v they don't even know they are age i v i mean it seems that we share with our with other community but what is it one makes is more  language the lack of understanding education education comes when you know things when you're willing to seek and get information but if you if you don't even have desire at all if you don't hop if you can't even cross that who really for good and to be honest with you and how we go from there are you know like how you can i mean when you have brave individual like solomon who's willing to put you know like what we call our sel if you are one of the person out off of six under five hundred or over that number came out expose yourself say about your lifestyle and you yourself and create awareness among it's also good for the community leaders for those church leaders to be an oddball kids you know we the pastor or the priest may not be on our book yet but we can