Health Department Educator Drives HIV Prevention Message Home

Visiting Houston's hot spots does not mean going to the city's top attractions for Jose Peña.

Hot spots are the places Peña frequents during his workweek to help stop the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Sites that reflect his definition of a hot spot range from street corners busy with drug activity and prostitution, to an apartment building that data pinpoints as the home of various people with sexually transmitted diseases.

As a senior health educator, Peña spends four workdays a week, and sometimes nights as well, crisscrossing the city looking for a hot spot where he and his co-workers in the Bureau of HIV/STD can park the Department of Health and Human Services' HIV Mobile Unit. Peña and the co-workers who staff the mobile unit represent the department's effort to curb the spread of the deadly disease in as many fronts and with as many prevention strategies as possible.

A customized 40-foot truck enables the department to take its education, counseling and testing services directly to the community, especially high-risk or hard-to-reach populations. Staff members are able to provide confidential testing for HIV, syphilis and chlamydia.

"At first people just come to us to get free condoms, but it does not take them long to realize we are in their neighborhood to help," Peña said. "Once they decide to come inside the mobile unit, we can take them to one of our three counseling rooms, go over the behaviors that put them at risk for HIV infection, and test them."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 800,000 to 900,000 Americans are infected with HIV. In Houston, Mayor Lee P. Brown declared a state of emergency in the African-American community in 1999 when its rate of HIV infection reached a crisis level. That year, 61 percent of the newly reported HIV infections in Houston were in the African-American population. The latest epidemiological reports reveal the African- American population accounts for 57 percent of the new HIV infections. AIDS cases in Houston and Harris County reported to the department since 1981 now total 18,740.

Peña's top priority is education, and it is the aspect of his job he enjoys most. He works hard to get the HIV prevention message to all those he encounters, especially mothers. He said mothers are exceptionally protective, focused on keeping the family together and will do anything to ward off harm. Basically, he converts mothers into educators.

"You sit and chat with people," he said. "It is education even though you are just having a conversation. You can educate a person in a relatively short period of time and that makes my day. I can say to myself, `Today was a good day. I helped someone change a high-risk behavior. I made someone start thinking about being safer.'"

The fact that AIDS has had an impact on his family plays a role every day in his dedication to spreading the prevention message. One of his uncles became infected with HIV, was treated harshly by the family, and eventually developed AIDS and died. This personal account resulted in his decision to do community outreach.

"I knew there had to be something better, so my goal became to try to help families understand HIV," he said.

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©2006 Texas Medical Center

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