Black teens and HIV/AIDS

Hazel Trice Edney:

Zaibaa Mahbi, a 16-year-old senior at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C., is walking down the street on her cell phone when she gets some shocking news.

"I'm just having fun, first of all. I'm out walking down the street and all that," Mahbi recounts. "And I get a text message saying that my friend, one of my very close friends, went to a party and did something really stupid, got high and hooked up with some guy she hardly even knew and got the virus, HIV."

She continues, "When you find out that someone close to you has AIDS…There's anger somehow, anger at yourself and anger at that person, and you are so distraught because that one action led to that consequence and there's no turning back."

Fortunately, the street scene that Mahbi describes in an interview is not real, but a role she plays in a 60-second public service announcement that will begin airing across the country on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day 2005, an annual international day of action on HIV and AIDS.

"Basically what it's trying to do is raise awareness and to help people to think before they act because people just follow their desires. They say, 'I want to do it right now,' but they don't think about what could happen," says Mahbi.

What is very real is the fact that Black teenage girls, the main target of the new PSA, are contracting HIV at alarming rates - in part - because of irresponsible sexual behavior after the use of drugs and alcohol, according to a report released this week from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the sponsor of the PSA.

"Although African-Americans ages 13-19 represent only 15 percent of U. S. teenagers, they accounted for 66 percent of new AIDS cases reported among teens in 2003," states the report. "That's 19 times the rate for White females and five times the rate for Hispanic females."

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