Luton's silent HIV sufferers

By Cindi John BBC News Online's Community Affairs Reporter

The young woman proudly shows off her sleeping baby to her visitor but this is not just a social call.

For Marie is HIV positive, one of a large number of Africans living with HIV in Luton.

Her boyfriend, from whom she probably contracted the virus, has abandoned her, and she now lives in a cramped bed-sit with her month-old daughter.

Marie, 21, arrived two years ago from Zimbabwe but was diagnosed HIV positive earlier this year.

"It was a big shock but I hadn't been feeling too well for a while, so I had some blood tests and then discovered I was HIV positive."

"At that time there was nobody I could turn to so I didn't tell anybody although I got some medical help," she says.

Marie is living in an area with one of the fastest growing number of HIV and Aids cases in the country - between 1998 and 2000 the number of cases being diagnosed in Bedfordshire nearly quadrupled.

By 2000 nearly two thirds of the county's cases were among black Africans who make up just under 1% of the population.

Were it not for her visitor, Meheret Selassie-Yoseph from the Adwa Foundation, who has arrived bearing nappies for the baby and food, she'd be completely alone, Marie says.

Meheret Selassie-Yoseph set up Adwa four years ago because she felt there was a need for a black-led organisation helping HIV sufferers.

"Back home in Africa we care for each other, we have a very strong communal relationship and I've realised that care that is tailored by a black organisation has a better understanding of our culture, our history, the way we talk, the food we eat, the way we think, it's a lot easier," she says.

'Stigma'

Black Africans are being diagnosed HIV positive at a faster rate than any other group in the UK.

Nearly three-quarters of HIV infections among heterosexuals diagnosed in 2001/2002 were probably acquired in Africa, according to the recent annual report on HIV and Aids by the Health Protection Agency (HPA).

And the research revealed that in the last five years cases in areas bordering London - like Luton - grew at faster rate than anywhere else in the UK.

I find it very easy to discuss things with people here in the support group but I wouldn't want to do that within my own community. Noma, Zimbabwean HIV sufferer

Nationally a third of HIV cases are believed to be as yet undiagnosed but those working in the field says that figure is likely to be much higher among Africans.

Many are reluctant to come forward for testing or help because they fear rejection by their communities, says Meheret Selassie-Yoseph.

"On the whole people don't really want to come out and deal with the community if they do find they're positive because there is a stigma. There's a stigma on their children and they're ostracised.

"So people are still very secretive about their positive status."

That's a view shared by Noma, a HIV sufferer from Zimbabwe, who attends a support group at Bedfordshire Body Positive (BBP).

"I find it very easy to discuss things with people here in the support group but I wouldn't want to do that within my own community," she says.

Noma has not yet told her family, including a 19-year-old son, in Zimbabwe of her HIV status, because she says people in Zimbabwe are so ill-informed about HIV they will think she is dying.

Pauline, also from Zimbabwe, was diagnosed in March 2003.

"I watched my husband die of Aids - he didn't get a formal diagnosis because he wasn't tested but you could see that was what it was. So it didn't amaze me when I got a positive diagnosis," she says.

Unlike Noma, Pauline feels it is best to be open about her condition and has told her immediate family in the UK - her sister and brother-in-law.

"They were OK about it but wanted me to go home to Zimbabwe. They said I would become too sick for them to take care of me," Pauline says.

Until more Africans were willing to be open about their condition and show it was not contagious or necessarily fatal, prejudices against sufferers would remain, she added.

Difficult issue

The fact that such a large proportion of HIV cases in Luton and Bedfordshire are to be found among the African population has long been acknowledged by the local health authority and other HIV agencies.

But it is an issue they are finding difficult publicly to confront.

Although statistics used to be published in its annual report the local health authority no longer keeps a breakdown of HIV cases in the region by ethnicity.

Chris Matthews, project manager at Bedfordshire Body Positive which has seen a marked increased in African clients, believes the situation poses a dilemma.

The Africans needed help, she said, but monitoring the number of sufferers locally and targeting projects specifically at them could expose them to hostility from the wider population.

"I think it's dangerous because the larger community will say, as happened when it was mainly affecting the gay community, 'HIV's got nothing to do with us it's the Africans, they've all brought in in'.

"Whilst I don't want to be blind to the impact it's having on the African community and potentially the Afro-Caribbean community I think there's a danger in compartmentalising HIV into these particular communities.

That's a point on which Meheret Selassie-Yoseph of Adwa agrees.

"It's not just a black or gay thing anymore it affects everybody within the community.

"As long as they don't document it, it can be presumed it's coming from one area when in actual fact it is already here and through the community including Asians and Caucasians," she says.

Some names in this article have been changed to protect the identities of individuals.