DETROIT, MI

— Social inequity is the reason HIV is 10 times more prevalent among blacks than other races, says a civil rights health leader.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People National Health Manager Rev. Keron Sadler said the organization wants to change that, and teaching through black churches is crucial to doing so.

Sadler said her organization spent a year studying 11 cities across the country, including Detroit, to explore the problem of disproportionately high HIV rates in black communities, as well as ways to address the problem.

The civil rights organization created a manual, "

," which it hopes encourages dialogue about the problem among the nation's 21,000 black church leaders and their parishioners.

Unveiled last week in conjunction with the NAACP's 103rd birthday, the manual frames the problem as a "social justice issue" rather than blaming behavior, Sadler said.

"In a white community, they have an option to go to get tested, go and receive treatment, it's more likely that they will have insurance to pay for treatment, to pay for testing," Sadler said. "It is not because black people do something different or worse... It's because we don't have the same privileges other people may have."

Despite having about 7.3 percent of the state's population, Detroit — with an 82.7 percent black population — has 37.5 percent of the known HIV cases statewide, according to the Michigan Department of Community Health Biannual HIV Surveillance Report released in January.



Blacks, representing 14 percent of the total U.S. population in 2009, accounted for 44 percent of the known HIV cases nationwide, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.



"HIV is rapidly affecting the black community and has for years," Sadler said. "We just haven't really had the conversation regarding it."

Sadler said the greatest HIV increases are occurring through male-on-male sexual transmission and within the males between 13 and 19.

Because of their close-knit ties within black communities, Sadler said the goal is to use the pulpit to educate blacks about treatment and prevention.

Although male homosexual contact may have led to recent increases within the black demographic, data released by the CDC indicates other causes, intravenous drug use and heterosexual sex, which caused 8 percent and 19 percent of the HIV cases respectively in 2010, are higher than with whites.



Within the white diagnoses, intravenous drug use and heterosexual sex accounted for 4 percent and 5 percent of the 2010 cases respectively; male homosexual sex accounted for 86 percent.

It's not that black communities engage in more high-risk behavior than their white counterparts, Sadler said, it's because their resources — testing, treatment, education and prevention tools — are lacking.

"A lot of people are connecting HIV only to personal responsibility, 'This is your fault that you contracted this virus,' and that's not how the NAACP views it," NAACP Health Program Director Shavon Arline-Bradley told National Public Radio. "There are also social issues that affect a person's ability to be able to transmit this disease, and also, in terms of long term access to care - things like poverty, education."