With each word, her lilting voice can serve up the warmth of her native Jamaica. But when the topic is HIV/AIDS and the young people the disease threatens, it almost always grows large and urgent. Goulda Downer, Ph.D., a health scientist, has ferried her share of frantic college students to clinics testing them for the virus that causes AIDS. She has sat with others eagerly awaiting or dreading results that could change their young lives in an instant.
The first time that Downer, a nutritionist, saw AIDS patients it was in 1987, when the disease was new and deadly. She says many of them were wasting away from malnutrition because they couldn’t eat. Since then, Downer’s curiosity about the disease and focus on the role that food and nutrition play in AIDS management has kept her on this path.
As the principal investigator and director of the decade-old AIDS Education and Training Center’s National Multicultural Center (AETC NMC) based at Howard University College of Medicine, Downer and her team train clinicians and promote culturally competent HIV/AIDS care. The federally funded grant Downer oversees also mandates training for minority-serving institutions.
But even as she works nationally and globally on HIV/AIDS, Downer stays focused on “my students,” something that means preaching, teaching and sometimes poking them to understand that AIDS is real.
Among young people, new HIV infections are highest among African-American males. The latest Centers for Disease Control (CDC) data released this month on HIV rates in American teenagers and young adults are sobering. Youths age 13 to 24 made up about a quarter of all new HIV infections in the U.S. during 2010, the CDC reported. And more than half of those young people living with HIV don’t even know they’re infected.
In the days prior to last Saturday’s World AIDS Day (the event is observed every year on 1 December), Downer spoke with Diverse about the need for campus commitment to HIV/AIDS training and prevention and what it will take to achieve an AIDS-free generation.
DI: As HIV rates climb among college-age students, is there a body of research that informs about HIV/AIDS and students of color at minority-serving institutions?
