Colleagues, associates and friends,

Attached is a paper published in the July 2005 issue of the Journal of the
National Medical Association entitled "Focusing “Down Low”: Bisexual Black Men,
HIV Risk and Heterosexual Transmission".

Let me say, at the outset, that I realize that some receiving this email are on
listservs which are solely dedicated to HIV treatment. That said, I will also
say that the issues surrounding the current misinformed preoccupation with the
"Down Low" (DL), in the Black community, as it relates to the spread of HIV (and
ancillary issues) warrant this noted exception and are sufficient to request
your assistance in distributing this very excellent, timely and much warranted
analysis of the DL controversy to any person or health-based organization
targeting the Black community with whom or which you work, with whom or which
you may otherwise have association or whom or which you are simply familiar.

This review of the literature is the best I have ever seen at analyzing and
distilling what we do and do not know about the DL and on what, and where, we
must concentrate our evidence-based efforts, in part, with respect to the
transmission of HIV in the Black community.

The researchers involved are part of an extremely small constellation of
researchers doing the required discrete research with respect to Black MSM and
an even smaller constellation who possess the intuitive ablilities to intrepret
qualitative findings vis-a-vis the indices which constitutute the research
agenda as suggested by these authors.

Greg Millet currently of the Epidemiology Branch of Division of HIVAIDS
Prevention (DHAP)
at the CDC is the lead author. Mr. Millett is listed for correspondence and
reprints.

I would also point out that the second author is Dr. David Malebranche. Dr.
Malebranche is an Assistant Professor and Clinical Investigator at Emory
University's School of Medicine and has been at the vanguard of those dedicated
to raising the anectodotal, simplistic, hyperbolic chatterings about the
bogeyman, which has surfaced in the last few years vis-a-vis Black MSM, to a
rationale discourse focused on identifying and programming the multi-facted
surrogate drivers of HIV in the Black community. His efforts are particulary
relevant as regards the current empirical abyss vis-a-vis Black heterosexual
tranmission of HIV in the United States.

Should you have questions, or be interested in participating in the rationale
aspects of that discourse, I would encourage engaging Dr Malebranche. Dr.
Malebranche may be reached at dmalebr@....

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Steve Oxendine
San Francisco














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