VIDEO: Role of community initiatives in HIV awareness, prevention

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I think they used to provide a lot more of community awareness than they're able to now, because there's just fewer of them, there's less funding for it and quite frankly, less motivation because people think this is a problem that's kind of gone away. But community awareness helps with things like I was just talking about, needing to make sure everybody has a test, understanding that coexistence of hepatitis C, all adults need a hepatitis C antibody screen as well. We're not doing that very well and that's a curable disease. If we found people before they get cirrhosis, you don't have to die of hepatitis C.

So again, community programs can reach out, hopefully get back into school systems to talk a little bit more about sexual health, not necessarily just sexual disease, but sexual health. It is a fact our kids are going to be sexually active, we may not as parents want to believe that, but they are and we would like them to be as healthy and educated and prepared as possible. We don't give them a key to a car and let them drive without some sort of driver's education, but we really don't talk too much about sexuality and sexual health and I think that's a part of why we're seeing still 30,000, 35,000 new cases of HIV in this country every year. That shouldn't happen and we shouldn't see a fifth or 20% of them coming in already sick.