Transcript

Awakening Your Inner Sexual Health Warrior | Michael Alonso | TEDxSistrunk

there's nothing like that three-letter word HIV that makes people clutch their imaginary pearls and go oh here we go again because we've been hearing it for such a long time right 36 years of wrap it up before you slap it up you know be careful who you have sex with AIDS kills you know we've just been hearing the message we got the sexual health talks we got the sex ed talks right and so this talk is actually not about that this talk is to try and look and see why for some reason with all of the interventions that we have folks are still getting HIV now we do know that HIV is not the death sentence that it used to be right because we can now put folks on medication make them virally suppressed which means they no longer transmit the virus and they live long healthy lives just like everybody else but something is going on and so numbers don't lie but they also don't tell the whole story but let's first look at the numbers the CDC the Centers for Disease Control decided to look to see what would be the lifetime risk of a particular group getting HIV and what we found was that men who have sex with men now this doesn't mean that they're gay could just mean that they're men who have sex with men so maybe they don't tell people they're gay but they have sex with men and it also doesn't intersect the fact that when they collected this data I didn't include transgender women as their own category but what we see is that one in six men who have sex with men will get HIV in their lifetime if this trend continues and what we also see is that when we look at the race and ethnicity of these men who have sex with men if they're african-american it's one in two that's 50% and if it's Hispanic it's one in four that's 25% and so what does this mean for our communities well when we take away the men who have sex with men risk category and we just look at race and ethnicity we start to see what we see a lot in this country is that people of color are disproportionately affected by all of the things that have to do with public health and so we started to see that for African American men if this trend continues it's one in twenty will get HIV in their lifetime and when we look at African American women it's one in forty eight now this might seem alarming but what's more alarming is that you have to look at the difference between black women and white women and so what's going on here because the numbers don't lie but they also don't tell the whole story so we're trying to figure out what is going on and what can be done about this now again I told you it wouldn't be a sexual health talk because we've already heard the ABCs of prevention and if anybody remembers the ABCs of prevention they've been around since the dawn of time I've been doing this for a long time and so the ABCs of prevention go like this a is for abstinence now abstinence is the most effective form of prevention right because the only safe sex is no sex but that's also not practical because we're biologically designed to procreate and have sex and it also feels great and then B is be monogamous now here's the thing with be monogamous I can be monogamous all that I want to be monogamous but is my partner be monogamous is your partner being monogamous right with the advent of social media Grindr tinder OkCupid the DMS and the Instagram what we're finding is that more and more folks are becoming monogamous which means that they might think that they're in a monogamous relationship and might not be now that doesn't mean I don't want you guys to be resigned and cynical about relationships that's not what I'm saying but I'm saying is that history says something and when I worked in New York City doing HIV test I saw it all the time I had to deliver positive HIV results to women who were married with children for their whole lives and HUD and were monogamous and then here they are and so we did a for abstinence and B for be monogamous and then C is for condoms condoms changed the world they're effective they're safe and they work if you use them the right way they protect from sexually transmitted diseases and HIV and even pregnancy but here's the kicker you have to we use them and so when we look at the data what we see is that only 23.8% of women actually report using condoms in their last sexual encounter and for men it's only thirty three point seven percent so that's leaving 70 80 percent of our sexually active Americans who aren't using condoms but why I mean I think we kind of know what but what we hear from the community is that they feel that condoms suck and this is interesting I love this graphic because it has the golden condoms and I always tell folks when we got when we're doing this work in the community is everybody wants to go to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory they just don't want to use the golden ticket to get there and it it interrupt something it interrupts that moment the free-flowing passion that is when we start and finish having sex we have to stop it impacts the feeling we get that it impacts the erections that folks get and so they just doesn't work with what we're doing sexually and so this is easy the harder part is the second reason why folks don't use condoms and it's because not only is it subtle it's also really pervasive because in today's society where we are unwilling to share our facebook profile passwords or Instagram passwords we don't give folks access to our cell phones or a personal email we're willing to have sex without a condom and so what one of the things that social scientists do is that we look at the interactions what are people doing how are they communicating either verbally or non-verbally and so what does it mean when we're about to have sex and I tell you go put on a condom or what does it mean what we're about to have sex and you tell me hey you're gonna put on a condom right and I heard it already in the audience it has to do everything with trust because we live in a society where we have to protect all of our data just not ourselves protect your emails protect your password your PIN number just don't protect yourself because nowadays what we're seeing is that people are performing the way that they trust folks by saying you're not to work I trust you I love you we're monogamous and so again I promise you this wouldn't be a talk about sex ed it's actually to talk about a game-changer because see the CDC did that report and they wrote a destiny out for us and they said if things continue the way that they're going this is the outcome that we will have and I say no we can interrupt that and so we finally designed a thing that can interrupt it and it's called prep and it stands for pre exposure prophylaxis or pre exposure prevention in the same way that a woman can take birth control to prevent an unwanted pregnancy anyone can take this to prevent unwanted HIV and it's more than 92% effective and it's safe and it's effective and folks don't know about it and why don't they know about it we don't know what we do know is that it works and not only does it work to prevent HIV it works to empower individuals to no longer have to rely on another person to do what they need to do to protect their sexual health I no longer have to tell you to wear a condom so that I can protect my sexual health now this may not seem applicable condom negotiation might be something that's happening in your lives but there's a lot of folks especially in this community that can't negotiate condom use because it could be something like they're in a domestic violence situation or culturally they just don't do that and in Broward County it's an issue because we have the second highest rate of HIV in the entire country and here locally black heterosexuals make the highest priority of population that we need to start impacting and so how do we do that well you'll wake in your inner sexual health warrior you find the power to interrupt this destiny to rewrite the destiny that the numbers are telling us that we have to live into and so the first thing and I cannot stress this enough we have to talk frankly about sex it's happening it has happened since the dawn of time and it will happen until the last human being is born on the planet and it's happened in the animal kingdom but we don't talk about it and the moment we don't talk about something we take away the ability to impact it to know the statistics know where you are ground yourself in your statistics so you can interrupt them because I don't know about you all but when I saw those CDC numbers I didn't know that I had a 1 in 25 chance or that some of my friends had a one in two chance so the moment you find out where you are locate yourself in those statistics interrupt them don't let somebody else give us our destiny and how do we do that as we put all hands on deck because the small little tiny group of public health professionals who trust me are not in it for the money and the glory that are doing this work it's not enough we need all hands on deck we need every single person that you know have you heard about prep when you're at the grocery store the liquor store the gym with your friends when you're hanging out when you're doing Netflix and chill ask hey do you know about prep start to have these conversations because if we don't then we're already stuck in a future that we're living into and we can't even interrupt it thank you