A "yogathon," held in the shadow of the soon-to-be-razed BART headquarters building near Oakland, CA's Chinatown, raised money to help maintain Asian Health Services' HIV/AIDS program.
Asian Health Services (AHS) has been serving the diverse low-income Asian and Asian American population of Alameda County, California, for 35 years, based out of Oakland's Chinatown.
Its doctors, nurses and other medical specialists and staff dispense care in at least 10 languages (English, Cantonese Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Khmer, Mien, Mongolian, Tagalog, and Lao) plus dialects of some of these languages.
Its work has won national recognition, but that doesn't make it immune from the current economic downturn.
If you buy into the simplistic stereotype that the Asian and Asian American population, whether in Alameda County or all over the United States, is well off and can easily afford private health care, then you know very little about the realities of this population subset.
Yes, there is a portion of the Asian and Asian American community that lives in or on the edge of poverty, and some aren't fluent enough in English or familiar enough with the mainstream system because they are recent immigrants.
One area of AHS's multifaceted medical care that's been particularly hard hit is its prevention and educational outreach program to lower income Asian and Asian Americans who may have HIV and AIDS. This program educates these patients about the disease and gets them tested and treated.
In fact, the modest HIV/AIDS program of Asian Health Services has lost 70 percent of its budget because of sharp cutbacks from Alameda County, which in turn has experienced deep slashes in funding from the State of California. The 70 percent cut translates into a $41,000 reduction in AHS HIV/AIDS program.
That may not sound like a lot of money, but it means a deep reduction in the workload of the one AHS staff member who has been doing a herculean task of reaching out to lower income Alameda County HIV and AIDS patients who are of Asian descent.
"Despite AHS's commitment to this issue, if new funding doesn't come in the next couple of months, we'll have to consider whether we can sustain the position or not," said Linda Okahara, director of community services for AHS.
To begin to close the $41,000 gap, AHS held a yogathon on Saturday, October 3, in Madison Square Park in Chinatown. About 50 people, including me, did as many as 100 poses over a three and one half hour period to help this worthy cause. Ten Asian American yoga instructors donated their time.
The yogathon raised approximately $8,000, and AHS is applying for grants and looking for other funding sources to make sure its HIV/AIDS program continues its essential work.
The yogathon was the brainchild of Patty Hirota-Cohen, who happens to be the sister of Sherry Hirota, the long-time chief executive officer of AHS. Patty teaches yoga at AHS and at Piedmont Yoga Studio in Oakland.
She said, "My sincere hope is that HIV/AIDS is something we can talk about openly in the API (Asian Pacific Islander) community."
Her statement gives a clue about the challenge AHS faces about HIV/AIDS in the Asian and Asian American communities of Alameda County. This challenge is not unique to these communities, but it is acute in the Asian American population because it's largely a taboo subject.
This is especially so for lower income Asian immigrant men -- approximately two thirds of the HIV/AIDS cases at AHS. Many of them are in denial about the possibility of contracting HIV, which can lead to full-blown AIDS, after they've had unprotected sex with other men, according to AHS's Okahara.
AHS has found that many of its HIV patients contract AIDS in a relatively short time period, an indication of testing late. That suggests these patients either don't know the risks or deny the possibility of getting the disease by waiting too long to get tested.
Dr. Sophy Wong of AHS said:
Since API (Asian Pacific Islander) testing is very low, we don't know the true prevalence of HIV/AIDS in our communities (or abroad, for that matter). The fact that in 2008, 83 percent of the API men having sex with men in Alameda County were late testers means they got diagnosed so late that they progressed to AIDS within one year of diagnosis.
That shows us that there are many API folks who don't know their HIV status until it's really late, much later than after the point we would normally start medications. The AHS program is important to inform the API community that HIV screening is important and accessible, and that treatment and management are available to all who test positive so it's not a death sentence anymore.
This is why AHS wants to at least maintain its HIV/AIDS program. The recent yogathon was one strategy to raise much needed funds to restore the program to its previous standard.
If you want to contribute to help AHS maintain its much needed work to combat HIV/AIDS, contact Asian Health Services.
No comments:
Post a Comment