disease that threatens to wipe out the majority of the community.

Visiting chairperson of New York Mayor's Council on AIDS and executive director of New York's BLACA, Mrs. Debra Frazer Howe, is stressing this point during her visit for World AIDS Day activities.

While noting that AIDS is not an ethnic disease and that half of the 310,000 people with AIDS worldwide are not black, Mrs. Frazer Howe said: "But the other 50 percent are us''.

And she said: "For the first time in the AIDS epidemic, AIDS is killing multiple generations of one race simultaneously across two continents.'' With blacks making up 60 percent of the Island's population and 90 percent of AIDS statistics, Mrs. Frazer Howe told The Royal Gazette it was time for the black community to take responsibility and unite against the spread of AIDS.

Instead of just concentrating on how AIDS started, Mrs. Frazer Howe said blacks should be concentrating on combatting it.

Borrowing a phrase from public health charge nurse Mrs. Gaylia Landry, she said: "The fact is there's a tiger in the house and we are all in danger if we do not stop it.'' But in order for AIDS education and awareness to be received and retained in the black community, she said, there must be "cultural competency''.

She advocated what she said is working in New York -- black leaders in politics, religion, the medical field, and people with "degrees in streetology'' sitting down with each other and making decisions on what to do about the spread of AIDS.

Noting the majority of churches' stand on homosexuality and condoms in Bermuda, Mrs. Frazer Howe said: "We cannot tell them to embrace homosexuality. But we can meet our people based on cultural competency where they are.'' "Churches need to stress AIDS as an issue,'' she said. "And the church has to maintain its responsibility to be compassionate, loving, caring, and organised. If the church does not say let's get together, it's not going to happen.'' Noting that the 65-member BLACA on which she serves has a membership which includes ministers of large, prospering churches and three people who are known to be HIV-positive, Mrs. Frazer Howe said: "We have systematically changed laws and rules governing AIDS in our city and country.'' The commission, which started out in 1988 with a $5,000 grant, has provided through fundraising and donations millions of dollars to the African Americans and Latinos who make up 68 percent of AIDS cases in New York.

And it aims to have 23 chapters throughout the US within the next three years.

"We would like to add Bermuda to that number,'' Mrs. Frazer Howe said.

"I would strongly advocate that there should be a Black Leadership Commission on AIDS here. And it should be supported by whites who care. It should be a monument to white people on this Island who I understand have been very caring and supportive. They have to be partners in this.'' Mrs. Frazer Howe said she planned to return to Bermuda in February with 10 other commission members to discuss technical aspects of setting up a BLACA in Bermuda.

She revealed that she also hoped to bring the Rev. Jesse Jackson to culminate the meeting.

She is scheduled to speak at a teen forum at Dr. E.F. Gordon Hall at the Bermuda Industrial Union headquarters this afternoon and at a parents forum at Wesley Methodist Church Hall this evening.

Mrs. Frazer Howe's advice came as an ecumenical and candle lighting service was held last night to remember more than 200 people who have died from AIDS in Bermuda since the first case was diagnosed in the early '80s.