Petrelis Files

LA Times: 0.48% HIV Rate for Gangs = "Time Bomb"?

Starting with the headline, the Los Angeles Times' April 5 story about a city-funded study looking at HIV and gangs, alarm was the overall tone, but that alarm is not necessarily borne out by some of the facts.

The LA Times screamed, "City Report Links Gangs to AIDS Time Bomb," conjuring up fears of an imminent explosion, playing on readers' fears about both gangs and HIV infection rates.

"The $75,000 study, among the first of its kind in the country, surveyed 300 gang members, about half of whom agreed to be tested for HIV," reported the paper. "One tested positive."

Okay, every epidemic starts with a single case of infection and we should be concerned about anyone contracting HIV, but is one person testing positive really a time bomb?

I don't think so, and because I wanted more information about the study and that one infection, I read the full study and discovered the following interesting bit of good news:

"A total of 144 HIV tests were conducted. All tests were negative. An additional 65 participants reported having been previously tested for HIV; one participant reported being HIV positive, yielding a reported prevalence of 1/209, or 0.48% among the study sample."

(See page 15.)

Hmmm, all of the HIV tests on the small sampling were negative. Guess the LA Times didn't read that part of the findings.

To the study's authors, however, who present lots and lots of pages of results about gang members' attitudes about HIV, its transmission, risky sex and drug behaviors and other issues associated with AIDS, those attitudes and that single HIV case may one day lead to an explosion of AIDS in the gang community. In the meantime, it appears as though LA Times headline writers must pump up the fear-factor, and researchers can use the paper's story to generate funds for more studies.

So the LA Times was wrong to report one person in the study tested HIV positive when the individual already knew his or her sero status, and a correction should run in the paper about this mistake.

Another news outlet, KNBC TV4, also reported on the study on their web site, with a vastly different headline and tone: "Report: Gang Members Are At High Risk Of Contracting HIV." No attempt to strike fear and alarm in that headline, to the credit of the station. And here's how the television station reported the findings:

"As part of the study, 144 of the gang members agreed to be tested for HIV; all came up with negative results. An additional 65 respondents reported that they were tested for the virus at least once between 1994 and 2005, with only one admitting to an HIV-positive result."

Regardless of both news accounts, I sense that the study's author, Stephen Simon, who is also the LA county HIV/AIDS coordinator, and others working at HIV and gang-intervention groups are disappointed the study didn't find a higher prevalence rate, and that even with zero HIV infections found out of 144 tested, Simon and colleagues still have to spin the results into alarming time bombs about to go off.

After all, who wants to read a headline that says, "LA Gangs Have 0.48% HIV Infection Rate"? You just can't frighten people and get more research money with such a truthful headline.