Valley AIDS Council announces HIV Binational partnership

HARLINGEN — AIDS knows no boundaries.

So why should the organizations which provide care have any?

They don’t. Late last week, the Valley AIDS Council announced a new partnership between Westbrook Clinic and health organizations across the border in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

The partnership, called the HIV Binational Committee, will work together to provide better care for people on both sides of the border who are living with HIV or are at risk of contracting the disease.

Although health care workers on both sides of the Rio Grande just created the committee, they have worked together for much longer.

“This actually started 15 years ago,” said Pedro Coronado, director of Linkage to Care for the Westbrook Clinic in Brownsville, McAllen and Harlingen.

The clinic conducts much of its operations as the Valley AIDS Council and vice versa.

“Through one of our programs, AIDS Education and Training Center, we actually partnered up with some doctors in Mexico so they could open up some clinics to provide HIV care in that area,” Coronado said.

Over time, organizations in Tamaulipas modeled their care efforts with what Westbrook was providing.

“We’ve always had communication about programs that we do back and forth,” Coronado said.

“But we never really had a coalition to involve other organizations that work with them over there and also work with us over here. So then the idea was we wanted to come up with a binational HIV committee.”

Health organizations in Tijuana and San Diego have already been working together for quite some time on HIV treatment and prevention. The same is true for Ciudad Juarez and El Paso.

“I got the idea, ‘You know, what we need is something like that over here because we always find ourselves with mutual patients,” Coronado said.

With the continuous flow of people between the Valley and Tamaulipas, it was a given that health organizations in both areas would see the same patients.

“If I’m a patient at Valley AIDS Council but I’m undocumented and I get deported back to Mexico and I go to Tamaulipas, it’s good to have that communication with those organizations in Mexico for continuity of care, and vice versa,” he said.

And it goes beyond strictly HIV and AIDS.

“If that patient is going to bring family that needs other kinds of services, that’s when we kind of pool our resources,” Coronado said.

“We say, ‘Hey, if you’re looking for family planning this is the place you want to go. Food services, you want to go here,’ So now we say, ‘Let’s us work together and involve other community organizations so that patients can access services from sides of the border.”

The rate of HIV infection on both sides of the border remains high.

“The numbers are not going down,” Coronado said.

“As a culture, Latinos, we tend not to go to the doctor unless we’re really in so much pain. Latinos tend to be diagnosed at a later stage, so they not only have a diagnosis of HIV but they have a diagnosis of AIDS already.”

There are several reasons for this, he said. One is the cultural stigma surrounding homosexuality.

Other factors include lack of health insurance and low health literacy.