Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education
Open Access

Review Article

African American Religious Community's Involvement with HIV/AIDS Education

Western Michigan University, USA

*Corresponding Author:

Julien Kouamé, Ph.D.
MPH, 6155 Woodfield Place #8
Kentwood, MI 49548, USA
Tel: (616) 617-6686
E-mail: Julien.Kouame@unh.edu

Received date: Sep 30, 2015; Accepted date: Apr 28, 2016; Published date: Apr 30, 2016

Citation: Kouame J (2016) African American Religious Community's Involvement with HIV/AIDS Education. J Community Med Health 6:420. doi:10.4172/2161-0711.1000420

Copyright: © 2016 Kouame J. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

This project assessed the involvement of the African American religious community in African American HIV/AIDS prevention. Participants of the study were 9 African American church ministers or pastors and 8 churchgoers. They participated in a 30 minute interview to answer questions regarding their churches' involvement in HIV/AIDS education. As a result, we found that the community's involvement in HIV/AIDS education is limited to abstinence preaching. We also found that stigma related to the disease is one of the obstacles that prevent the church to diversify HIV/AIDS educational programs. The disease is stigmatized because it involves sex, homosexuality and drug use. Contrary to previous authors who have written that condom is a taboo subject in the church community we found that church members can openly discuss condom only for the use by married couples. We hope that future planning and implementation of public health programs in the African American religious community consider these findings.

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