Other articles by Stephanie Innes:

A super devotion to caring Sherlockian effort to find origin of AIDS took 8 years PBS topic: How family coped with cancer curse Dr. Weil will share his elixir for healthy aging Desert rescuer littered; sentence is suspended Judge: Border volunteer 'littered' by leaving water for illegal crossers It's never too early for flu shot, health authorities agree UMC honored as country's 5th-best teaching hospital In global flu outbreak, who gets saved? Stories link cancer battles, insurance woes

Trades/Construction
Water Tec
Dispatcher Driver/Transportation
DRIVERS Construction
ROR Construction
Residential Framing Carpenters Administrative & Professional
JEWISH FEDERATION
ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT Administrative & Professional
AVIVA, Inc
Executive Director Health Care
PAINTED HILLS PEDIATRICS
LPN, RN, MA Health Care
RLM Services, Inc
Pharmacist

Hispanic women are about five times more likely to get HIV than white women.

That statistic alone was enough to spur Tucson's Luz Southside Coalition into action.

The group has created a Web site encouraging local Hispanics to be tested for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The Web address is: www.TakeTheTestTucson.org. The site is expected to be up and running within the next few days.

Part of a three-year, $750,000 federal grant awarded to the coalition's overseer, the non-profit Luz Social Services Inc., will be used to pay for it.

The coalition does health work on Tucson's South Side and says it is particularly concerned about the rising rates of HIV among women.

"The reason for a lot of infections among women in general is heterosexual contact. Their partners are partaking in behaviors they don't tell their wives or partners about," said Rafael Vega, the coalition's HIV/AIDS prevention program coordinator.

"We want to address communications between partners, and between parents and children. In Latino families, parents often do not talk a lot about sex and being sexually healthy," Vega said.

The Web site will provide information about HIV/AIDS, as well as local places that offer low-cost testing, including Pima County's Teresa Lee Clinic, 332 S. Freeway Road.

Vega hopes the site will also act as a resource center, where South Side agencies can collaborate to offer more testing and education.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among all racial and ethnic groups, Hispanics have the second-highest rate, behind blacks, of AIDS diagnoses for adults and adolescents.

The rate of new HIV/AIDS cases among Hispanics in Pima County between 2001 and 2005 was 13 per 100,000 of the population, the state health department says. For Anglos in that same time period, it was 10 per 100,000, the statistics show.

"There are a lot of people who don't know they are HIV positive and have been infected for many years and don't know it," Vega said.

The marketing and publicity effort will include bus-bench and radio advertising in both Spanish and English directing people to the Web site, plus a direct phone line with information about taking the HIV/AIDS test.