STUDY FINDS MEN UNLIKELY TO USE CONDOMS DESPITE DISEASE
POSTED: JAN 23, 2004
By Jay Reeves
The Associated Press
January 23, 2004
DATELINE: BIRMINGHAM, Ala.
A new study focusing on poor, black men at an Alabama clinic treating sexually transmitted diseases found that most would rather risk infection than use a condom for "safe sex."
The report highlights the problem health professionals face with reducing the spread of disease among blacks, who are contracting STDs including AIDS at a rate much faster than whites.
A co-author said Friday the people most at risk for sexual diseases live in a world of poverty, violence, drugs, alcohol and sex that few others see or understand.
"There's something about the social context I don't think we've grabbed hold of yet," said Diane Grimley, a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
The study was published in the current issue of the American Journal of Health Behavior. Other studies have produced similar findings elsewhere, Grimley said.
Researchers interviewed 224 males who sought treatment for a sexually transmitted disease at a clinic for low-income patients in downtown Birmingham from 1997 through 1999.
Eighty-seven percent of the men were black, and the rest were white. The number of whites in the study - 29 - was so small it was impossible to determine whether their attitudes were statistically different from the 195 blacks, Grimley said.
Despite knowing or suspecting they already had a disease and understanding that not using a condom increased their likelihood of getting another one, 66 percent of the men with a primary partner said they did not plan to use a condom in the future. One-third of the men without a main partner said they wouldn't use condoms.
Asked to rate the reasons they wouldn't use a condom, men mostly said they did not want to have to rely on their partner's cooperation and that condoms made sex feel unnatural.
Grimley said men in more intimate relationships were the least likely to consider condoms.
"The situation in which men reported the least confidence in using condoms with a main partner was the one in which they wanted their partner to know that they were committed to the relationship," she said.
Rather than using a condom, many of the men preferred to take their chances and seek treatment for whatever disease they catch, the study suggested. That is a reason some clinics see the same patients more than once.
"These men will continue to utilize the system for treatment, but will do so in the absence of modifying their risk behavior and, subsequently, acquire a new infection or reinfection," the report said.
Health officials are struggling to reduce the rate of HIV, which causes AIDS, and other sexual diseases across much of the South.
In Alabama, blacks make up about 60 percent of the AIDS patients over the last two decades despite representing only one-quarter of the population.
Statistics show about 46 percent of Alabama's AIDS patients are black men, and 14 percent are black women. White men account for 34 percent of the cases and white women, 4 percent
