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Young messengers Teens spread the word on AIDS prevention in Mon Valley Tuesday, May 15, 2001 By Ervin Dyer, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Ryan Early is not someone you'd expect to be delivering lessons on AIDS prevention.
He's neither a doctor, health-care worker nor research expert.
He's a 15-year-old student at Woodland Hills High School who has his heart set on playing football for the Wolverines in the fall.
And he wants to stop the spread of AIDS in the Mon Valley.
Toward that latter goal, Ryan gets a lot of help from the McKeesport HIV/AIDS Youth Task Force.
Its mission is twofold: to provide summer jobs for young people and to deploy more of them in the fight against HIV infection.
How do they fight? With buckets -- each filled with gauze, plastic gloves, alcohol cleansing pads and paper towels. Health experts call these items universal precautions; they protect against infection if a person is exposed to an infected person's bodily fluids.
When the program began last summer, participants spent a month going to four hours of classes twice a week. These sessions were no-holds barred clinics on disease transmission and prevention.
Doctors showed how to wear gloves and safely handle contaminated equipment, and former prostitutes and drug users spoke candidly on living with the virus and the shame that all too often surrounds it.
Once they graduate from the program, the teens take their buckets and make the rounds to Mon Valley community groups. The teens do most of the talking, but health experts accompany them to help with questions.
"There are people out there who don't know how you catch AIDS," said Ryan, who lives in Turtle Creek. "We had to let them know it's not casual contact. It's mainly through blood connections, sexual intercourse and stuff like that."
Much of Ryan's compassion stems from a family legacy of tolerance and understanding.
A polite young man, he learned the importance of community stewardship by tagging along with his social worker mom, Melody Lockett-Carter. She signed Ryan up or the program.
"I know he's at an age where he can make a baby," said Lockett-Carter. "I thought [HIV prevention] would be a good thing for him to learn."
Ryan was exposed to the roughest side of HIV/AIDS when an uncle and a male cousin died of AIDS.
"For years," said Ryan, "my uncle feared for his life. Every time he caught a cold or got sick, he thought he'd end up dying."
Ryan isn't always formal in trying to educate others about HIV. Often, it spills over in his conversation with friends and other students at Woodland Hills High School.
He said most students want to know about HIV. "Teens are sexually active,' he said. "They know a little bit, but they want to know more, because there's a lot of HIV in the Mon Valley."
In fact, most health experts would tell you there's HIV everywhere. Recently, they point to what many consider a growing racial divide with the AIDS epidemic: the sharp increase in infections in poor and black communities.
African-Americans, though 13 percent of the U.S. population, accounted for 45 percent of new AIDS cases in 1998 and 49 percent of all AIDS deaths.
Of the 8,700 people who took confidential tests for HIV in Allegheny County last year, 59 tests came back positive.
Of that number, 21 were gay males and 18 were heterosexual intravenous drug users. There were 20 black males who tested positive and 13 black females.
Eleven of the HIV infections were found in people between the ages of 13 through 29.
Nationally, for black youths, the numbers is just as dire: from ages 13 to 24, blacks were 63 percent of the adolescent cases of HIV in 1997. Black children make up 58 percent of pediatric AIDS cases.
Ryan thinks the virus is racing through the black American teen population because not enough people are cautious.
Parents should talk with their kids about HIV, he said, but there are some parents who don't know a lot, and some kids who are hard-headed.
"They shouldn't take it as a joke," said Ryan.
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