STD stats show value of health talk at barbershop

Brian Davis has been cutting hair at a cozy corner barbershop in north Minneapolis for seven years, but today he finds himself on the front line in one of Minnesota's most important public health campaigns.

Armed with urine cups and brochures, community health advocates are venturing to carwashes, nightclubs, street corners and barbershops in an effort to curb the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Davis joined the effort this year, hosting a session of "Clipper Clinic," which offers free preventive health services -- and a free haircut -- to anyone who walks in.

The importance of those efforts was underscored Thursday, when the state Health Department reported that cases of sexually transmitted disease (STD) in Minnesota reached a record high in 2011, with communities of color disproportionately affected. African-Americans are infected by gonorrhea at a rate 26 times that of whites and are 10 times as likely to be infected by chlamydia -- statistics that caused Health Commissioner Dr. Edward Ehlinger to call for increased efforts to target disparities in those communities.

Seeing success

Fred Evans, community health coordinator for Fremont Clinic in north Minneapolis, is one of a handful of innovators who have been taking that campaign to the streets for seven years.

Through impromptu STD testing at various locations around the community, his state-funded program, Seen on da Streets, has tested more than 11,000 young men and women.

In December, he joined forces with the University of Minnesota's Program in Health Disparities Research, the health plan UCare, and a number of community health programs and barbershops to participate in the Clipper Clinic.

"These programs have proven extremely successful," Evans said.

Despite the rising STD levels across Minnesota, the black-white STD gap is slowly decreasing. The African-American rate of gonorrhea infection has decreased by more than 45 percent since 2008. Similarly, chlamydia rates decreased by 16 percent over that period.

Peter Carr, director of STDs and AIDS for the Minnesota Department of Health, said the disparity between blacks and whites is "one of the defining characteristics of STD statistics in Minnesota," but that innovative community programming presents hope.

"These are exactly the kind of approaches we need to try and address this disparity," he said.

Giving back

Davis is proud of his shop, Brian D's Old School Barbers, but he didn't want his contribution to the community where he was raised to end with the fresh "line-ups" and clean shaves.

So when Evans began visiting to hand out condoms and administer tests for HIV and STDs, he saw it as his "own little way of giving back."

His barbershop hosted the February Clipper Clinic, which he called "a huge success."

Davis said he's glad that health care providers are beginning to see the value in the comfortable, honest relationship that black men have historically enjoyed with their barbershops.

Evans agrees, pointing out that his program hinges on the ability to frame health care -- often viewed as uncomfortable and inaccessible -- in a way that speaks to the culture of the community.

He said discussing reproductive health with others who "look like you and come from where you're from" is a powerful tool that should be used to engage underserved populations, particularly young men of color.

Evans has used the tactic to uncover a host of reproductive health myths that would "just about make you want to fall over and die" -- including a homemade STD test involving one's own earwax that he said generations of men have wrongly relied on.

The self-appointed "mythbuster" of north Minneapolis said he hopes community members continue to think of ways to spread knowledge and claim responsibility for one of the biggest health care issues in the state.

"We're still here and we're still fighting," he said. "This isn't a black, white or Latino issue -- it affects everybody, so everybody needs to do their part."

Amanda Bankston is a University of Minnesota student on assignment for the Star Tribune.