Van Service Brings Free HIV, Hep C Testing To West Village

WEST VILLAGE, NY — "Free condoms!" calls out Naheem Escort, a safe sex educator and recovery coach for young gay and bisexual men, on a corner near the West Side Highway on a recent Thursday afternoon.

Escort and a handful of other staffers were set up with a table outside a health services van at Christopher and Weehawken streets that brings HIV and hepatitis C testing and other health services to neighborhoods across the city.

"Whoever walks past, I engage them, I tell them that we have free testing, free condoms, try to make it light banter — because there's a stigma behind HIV," said Escort, a staffer at the Alliance for Positive Change, which launched the mobile health services van this summer.

"A lot of people don't have medical coverage, they don't have the time to do certain things, so we try to make it convenient so you don't have to go to the hospital or a doctor's office," Escort said.

The van, which will travel around the city but is now located at the West Village corner every Thursday 2 to 8 p.m., offers HIV and hepatitis C testing, STI and health screenings, harm reduction outreach and overdose prevention training for people with substance use disorders, connection to other medical services, and education on PrEP and PEP, two medicines used to prevent HIV infection.

"It's a low-threshold, easy-access strategy to bring our services out into the community and to extend our physical presence in neighborhoods," said Sharen Duke, the executive director at the Alliance for Positive Change, which launched the mobile health services van this summer.

It's about, "meeting New Yorkers where they are in their neighborhoods," Duke said.

The new van program, Alliance on the Move, will primarily focus its services in Washington Heights, East and Central Harlem, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village and Hell's Kitchen. The non-profit also has four brick-and-mortar locations in Manhattan.

"We try to engage people about safer sex," said Guy Williams, an associate director who started as a peer intern 17 years ago with the non-profit. "Sometimes people want condoms, other times they want more information."

Though new HIV diagnoses declined between 2016 and 2017, there were still more than 2,100 new HIV diagnoses in 2017, according to the city's Health Department 2017 report released late last year. Some 10,500 people living with HIV had high viral loads, signaling they were not receiving proper medicines to manage HIV, with the greatest share being among black men (35 percent); Latino and Hispanic men (23 percent); and black women (21 percent).

Manhattan's west side and upper Manhattan neighborhoods were among the highest in the city for prevalence of people with HIV and/or AIDS, on par with other neighborhoods in The Bronx and Brooklyn, the 2017 report's data maps show.

For gay and bisexual men, particularly those in sex work, engaging in survival sex, or men of color, "we want them to be protected,” said Williams.

"What better way now than with PrEP and condoms.”

In addition to the weekly West Village outreach service, Alliance on the Move will be at Fort Tyron Park on Oct. 22, 4:30 to 8:30 p.m. and Second Avenue gay bar, The Cock, in the East Village on Oct. 24, 7 to 10 p.m., according to the non-profit.