very very very special segment of truth today with gloria thomas i am your host and i want to thank you for inviting me and my guest into your home i have a very very very special panel tonight  it is my dream that we provide our community with education and as we all know education really does can save lives and tonight we're going to talk about a very special subject it's a very big health concern and there's a lot of i think lack of information in the public and in the community with regard to our topic tonight so the name of the habsi and people of color and the reason we're going to have the show tonight is we're going to provide you with some information about some very special events coming up but we're also going to give you some education on habsi and you know maybe encourage you to get tested and encourage you to take some steps and educating other people in your families and your communities and grab a home to what's available to us to create a healthier life for all of us so my panel tonight are some very special people i thought really honored and proud to be here with them tonight they are making great strides in the community with regard to have to see done a phenomenal job for nominate john and i'm going to start from my immediate laughter and have each of you introduce yourselves and just a little bit about why you're here support if they are infected with the virus thank you my name is i am in this and i'm here to participate and bring awareness to our black community where as you said before there is so much educated people about this virus called apathy and it's my intention that people would come out to test it and learn more about that this very uprising virus that's going on in  just put it this way when i when i was tested for help see i mean there was no way i would have thought i had it you know when i went for some blubber and i found out that that before it was very very hard getting a biopsy but now it's not really you know they may have come a long way with that so they tested that and it came back and not only did i have the virus of hep c but also cirrhosis of the it sometimes there's exposure to say like with tb you know you have to be i've been around it until you've been tested and a lot of times and i black communities we don't put forth that effort to come out and when there's ways to very potent thing to come out sooner on the body things that can happen in your body but the true way to find out to come surest so my beautiful young man when did you get involved with this wonderful project well i got involved i guess about two years ago and i think it probably be instructive for me to say something about my experience of testing be so unlike rabbits diseases through for example where you would feel the symptoms either dramatically and quickly many people were out infected with killer there are many many people at large to people who do not know they have it and only find out about it mike idea for and where i found out about it was that i was telling a lot of women who were writing over here d that's how i found out i would have been moving along until when i would have found out about it would have been you know and it's more advanced stage and that is right thirty three people are in the baby boomer generation of people who are between december january first nineteen forty five and december thirty first nine hundred sixty for that whole generation the he and they're approaching the age at which the virus has been present perhaps for a long time and are approaching what they call cirrhosis and if you have cirrhosis which is irreversible scarred forever you can get liver cancer live twenty twenty seventh street oakland california and that's where we gained knowledge about this virus that's going on which i'm fairly new there i've only been there about a year and but i've i've and the community in our bodies and a lot of times i kind of put it when is the information is there but you just don't take the time to come out find out what's going on so it's readily available for could mean that you've had it in the past short turns out that one out of for people actually cleared the infection on their own and the first six months if they go to a doctor at a doctor doesn't know his simpler asymptomatic or symptomatic but you can't tell how to do this for sure so let me tell you about my own history i had it probably since the nineteen sixt here hep c is like i know a spy but to let people know what's going on in your bodies and how it affects you having to have seen there and your not being able to take the right with myself i  enough we can fight but it just living there and did damage to my to my neighbor also but there's a cure and there is hope i always say if you can look up you can get out they're here to help everybody and i communities sure you're aware and know that there is that hope and that there is a cure for hep c wow and i want to say a little bit more about my experience in early that doctor said sylvester told me that i did not need treatment because the treatments that are available there were more onerous really than just going along with the virus because they'd cost  i'll see what happens because i want to clear it even though like i said i was told ad did not need treatment there but so but the point i want to make is that you do understand that you have it because then you want to find out the severity of it are whether or not you need to be treated to need to be treated but the advancement in terms of dress and the period of time with which you have to take them aids virus and did a whole lot of education without a lot of work and it's paid off so perhaps it's not as debilitating you know there was a time when the when you got a diagnosis of  child with a death sentence back when you got it no matter what kind of cancer was if you got that diagnosis it was a death sentence well obviously we're in a very good place to be up against the disease of hep three minutes of the show so i want to make sure that each of you have an opportunity to speak to the public to encourage the community to come out and even if you don't come out next sunday please get tested please get we can all change one mind at a time yes mine at a time is all it takes but i want to give you guys this opportunity to maybe take a minute and you know if you know one minute really want to know where you are do want to know what you have to do if you do have it to contain it it's not clear right now and i think i have to follow message because as i said i've been  saying for thirty three years i'm not in the story but i was in that thing and they were on and hang on and a lot of time with even with the not true which is you don't you know you don't take the time to go and get tested well please don't throw it away get tested get help and even if you're tested the information comes back good go through your entire family through your entire family and encourage everybody to get tested so i'm going to get tested weekend everybody it was a pleasure to have you invite me in your home i look forward to seeing you next time and remember to get task ahead rob somebody care for somebody get tested and encourage somebody else to get