washington i am a musician i write and i see music classical music to be precise and also i volunteer and work with the organizations such as  i think the issue is mostly the issue among africans is that a lot of times they do not talk about this and i am very grateful that you are giving us the opportunity to talk about the disease on the air so that people can actually know that this it's like the influx of new infections that have been happening from two thousand and eleven to two thousand and thirteen and still we still do not have to decide to stick for two thousand and fourteen before all we know is that it has continued to rise because many individuals that had not been tested that are now going to get tested so i think as much as it is alarming that the rates are going higher i also think it's a good thing because in that means that people are getting tested now they were not being tested before these are public people who had it for a long time but now they're just it's just now getting caught so it is sad though because these are my community my countrymen and also looking at the age groups hiv aids new infections are actually more and more they're higher among the middle age and the younger generation so between the ages of twenty and forty that is where most of most of the new infections are being found which is people who are they still have a long long life to live you know and so to have such  it just the fact that you're talking about it there's a stigma that comes around i personally am not paid to be negative however i have i have family members who have passed away from the disease so i have seen my my mother and my father having to take care of siblings that are dying as a witness to hospice care in my own home however when i when i come out and talk about something like this know there is a part of me that at the back of my mind that knows that there is someone who will look at me and decide that ole pansy must be hiv positive that's why she's stuck in about it and you know now we need to be afraid of her you know maybe i was checking out some guy and now they decide oh no i don't want this girl anymore because they know she is hate a repository you know so the stigma is huge and also the lack of education of not really understanding the benefit of being tested and knowing the discovery of the virus q is very important because then that means you're able to control how it affects your life people do not really have the education and it  comes down to we're not talking about it sex is a taboo nobody wants to talk about sex and yet even twelve year olds thirteen year olds know a lot more than  do know that there is that like i said before it is that cultural stigma that is still present because i mean it's a scary thing it's not it's not an easy thing is not an easy pill to swallow it's not something we talk about often we assume that every person is negative but in truth in facts there is a lot of and diagnosed hiv individuals that are living in our communities as is every other community  so yeah i think we're still at a place where there is a need to talk about a lot there is a need to not be afraid to mention sex he mentioned faith based communities and it just i'm a christian up at personally and a christian my music is gospel music and one thing i have noticed in our churches is that we never want to talk about sex we never want to talk about it it's not our and honorable thing to talk about yet it is indeed something that is very alive and active in our homes you know our parents obviously have to do it for us to be here you know our teenagers are doing it in schools if they're not doing it like there's no the usual way that you expected there are they are performing other forms of sex or sex sexting we've we've seen  statistical the exact number of how many kenyans are living in the seattle king county area but obviously given the ratings of the statistics of hiv infections obviously they have to be a very large kenyans living in seattle for us to have such a huge influx of newly diagnosed infections but there is it does have a we do have a very large population of have the exact statistics i mean if we're looking at forty thousand people and only two hundred forty four people guides to yeah yeah it's a it's a very small margin compared to that but like my concern is that age group because i'm looking at the statistics here and it looks like the highest number of it's the male of the known let's let's let's move up a little bit maybe you'll show this to me on the show if you'll be able to show this later yes that is what i wanted to show it shows that you know back in two thousand and ten it looks like the margin the african american and we only had ninety eight new diagnosis is and then we had seventy two africans living in in the seattle king county area only seventy two people had been diagnosed but then come two thousand and twelve going into two thousand and thirteen it's like it's like the tide changed and we had ninety two americans and ninety seven africans who got diagnosed so that there is a turn how do we move from seventy two to ninety seven let's keep going down on that  that as you continue talking about that and we're looking at the age brackets that are highly affected and the age brackets that are in the on this graph it's a forty to forty nine year olds that's the highest but then the thirty to thirty nine also  creeping up and you have the twenty to twenty nine ers that are coming up the bills little twenty most of them are probably born with the virus so you know sometimes we tend not to look at them much but you know i'm looking at those that probably were born without the virus and it is a lot of cognitive decisions that were made that they put themselves in a compromising position and actually got affected by the disease so it's it's it's very and it is very sad and look at it look at the margins of men between the age of forty to forty nine are the highest and when it comes to women it's women between the ages of thirty and thirty nine so  culture does not usually accommodate you know older men interacting sexually with younger men mostly not all mostly it's the other way around it's the older man who interacting and it's usually a ten year to fifteen year gap gap difference between the sexual interactions and when you look at this it actually makes sense because the man a man who is forty nine year old forty nine years old is getting with a woman who's probably thirty two and they get the fairness you see so it tells you that these are sexually active people that are getting the disease it's not so much people who have been born with it but people who are getting it as adults because of cognitive decisions that they're making it is really him it's a very important and also it's important to go into a culture and find out what are some of the of the behaviors some of the men toll mental frames of mind are you know are people faithful in their marriages are they are they part are they living in one of the most relationships as opposed to you know i am with you but i'm going to sleep with so it's also insolence so and so and especially in the younger generation there's a lot of just pick up someone some random from the globe and you decide that this is the person that i'm going to sleep with tonight and sometimes you're not very careful when you're in your drunken state a condom will break in your drunken state you'll forget to put on to conduct the other thing would be i personally am an advocate of celibacy and till you are married you know maintain the trust between the two of you be trust trust yourself maintain trust towards yourself and just wait until you're married to this person and when you're married to this person if if if if i was able to discipline myself as a single person and not have sex before marriage even when i had a friend or a boyfriend or a fiance then in the time of marriage it will be passed it will be possible for me to discipline myself even then to stay faithful to this one person it's just a sense of discipline  important because this is very alarming and it's good to do something for our community especially for our you know young people really we have to stop you know hiv aids after thirty years to that is you know like  which is being headed by the executive director her name is the reverend mary diggs hops and go to w w w dot r t h dot or r g and there you will find all the information that you need as far as directing you to testing sites as far as giving you info information on how to live healthy live better if you are diagnosed at the virus it's not the end of the world if you have the virus you still can live a full life you still can live feeling life a happy life and then there are new inventions that are coming out that even making it possible for individuals who have hiv aids i don't know why the problem is everybody has information every time if there is no information just focusing in different in especially in ethiopia if somebody is hiv aids maybe he can give us i was working with people who live in my program we invite people who live in safe i say something i always do the same but it's better to say something if you say something maybe the change will be fast so we have to encourage these kind of people this is what i want to say thank you  have tried to get support groups organized for people who are living with hiv in the african community and the story that i've heard several times is that those support groups don't work because the people who are affected with hiv don't even want to identify themselves to each other because they're so afraid of how they're going to be received in the community or that there will be information about their status that will be disclosed to other people outside of that group and so i think that this is something that is really i also want to give solomon a lot of credit because people who have hiv in the african community many of them are very afraid i've heard terrible stories about how people have been treated by others when they disclose their status because of the stigma and so i think that we it would be wonderful for people to come out and to have more people disclose their status and i think it would bring more openness to it but at the same time i think the community needs to be willing to be receptive to that and to show their support so that people are not so afraid people will not disclose their status if they feel like it's going to hurt them and i've been doing interviews with people who have hiv who are from africa for a while and i ask people about their experiences with stigma from their family from friends from neighbors there are a variety of questions from different people and i had to add a question after all of those questions about stigma because the questions are about how people perceive that they are being treated by other people because of their hiv status but i had to add additional questions because so many of the people that i was interviewing haven't disclosed their status to anyone other than their medical provider they're living with it by themselves and so i think it would be a huge leap forward to have more people come out and share their experiences about living with hiv in this community but i also think that that is a really difficult step and that might be something that we can talk about more here is how to make around seattle area you can do it nation white you know maybe were white is that just best way then once people really get used to that they have to see the benefit of disclosing i think disclosing four of the kind of just very extremely difficult so does a community also is not easy i think most i don't know maybe not everybody disclose you know so if you can really have that support group at least we can really talk about the only things they need these people me why don't you do this i mean he like a ten thousand idea look i'm just one person you know i'm not even really getting paid to do that i'm able to do that because i live in the state at least i get the basics so yeah talking well i am not a medical doctor but i know that all of the hiv tests that are out there have different levels of sensitivity and specificity so that means if a person is really positive a really negative the test does better or worse at detecting the antibodies in their blood and so there are some tests out there that are not as good as others and they will return false negative false positives and there are tests that will give some amount of false negatives so from a public health perspective when we are supporting people to do prevention work and do hiv testing work we always try to make sure that people are using the best tests so that we're not giving people incorrect results it does happen from time to time but hopefully as the tests get better and better that that won't happen as frequently anymore yeah i want to test every trade what i have seed or what i meant to say though what people have say which is since this kind of continuum of services with this hiv be whether it is empowering and getting that piece inside hugh to take you to testing and knowing that there is  challenge what makes us to for example if we have free hiv testing next door how many of us are going to go there and do that testing do we know that not forget about the they were doing other health affairs and then i wanted to document myself doing taking the blood donating and testing and that quick and then it didn't work out well because i couldn't make it because of confidentiality other things but i did the testing and there was other community members who could not dare to come to that room confidentially and do that little test and find out these terrorists so we have that giant elephant in the room but now it is there if you need it is very expensive but it's not viable but who wants to take the social support do other communities are doing this thing other americans who are male having sex with other men do they have support groups are they doing that how they're doing it why not us so we have to ask ourselves why have to take advantage of this opportunity so if we do the right thing following that  themselves they are liberal on educated and empowered him out for themselves they are not willing to do and be an example for the community so yeah december first we have to be happy i'm is very very significant i mean it's really very deep a big big difference i have been working with the ethiopian community once every while and  media is very important media to reminding you know these these diseases exist in america you know most people when they come to america they have to go through the tests for many people for that kind of space i wonder how we are going to eliminate those missing diagnosis it is a perception that really doesn't help anybody so how could that happen i don't know how it happened but i want to know at least  sick i am not a medical doctor but i know that all of the hiv tests that are out there have different levels of sensitivity and specificity so that means if a person is really positive a really negative the test does better or worse at detecting the antibodies in their blood and so there are some tests out there that are not as good as others and they will return false negative false positives and there are tests that will give some amount of false negatives so from a public public health perspective when we are supporting people to do prevention work and do hiv testing work we always try to make sure that people are using the best tests so that we're not giving people incorrect results it does happen from time to time but hopefully as the tests get better and better that that won't happen as frequently anymore swedish i would expect better from you're all right there are varying degrees of sensitivity and specificity with certain tests in different organizations in different organizations use different types of tests themselves so it all depends upon the individual as to which test probably  most appropriate for them you know there are things like the home test kit out there that does have a lower sensitive a say and it's an oral mucosal transit a test so it's not all it's not a saliva test there are some other tests that are one minute to say test that are give it to the community now they're doing great things with them well and i think just to support this they should pledge to do something about it and  thing that i saw them on brought is i think i'm animas website networking especially in our community and it's crucial and everybody's now using new technology websites and also more while up so i think we can start success