During the Mexican Independence Day celebrations, the organization Mexicanos Unidos (Mexicans United) launched a new Internet site for the Mexican immigrant community, which seeks to help young people get information about health topics, including HIV/AIDS prevention. With a new Internet project, www.mexicanosunidos.org.mx, the organization hopes to get the attention of Mexican and other Latino youth through entertaining and informative videos covering different topics to help the community, for example, by counseling on disease prevention and resources for HIV tests and condom distribution.

“We launched the site on September 16 because we wanted it to be part of the [Independence Day] celebrations in the month of September. Instead of saying, come, have a few beers, we want people to educate themselves and protect themselves against diseases such as AIDS,” Javier Soriano told Diario de Mexico.

He added that the Mexican community has big disadvantages in terms of health, especially in the light of the latest reports that show a high rate of HIV cases among Mexican youth.

“We think of websites that make sense for the people in our community. That is why on this site we want to put out different messages that help our people in an entertaining, informative, but still fun way. We designed it with help from people’s comments, and many of them were from young people,” added Soriano. “Our community needs to be informed on topics like these, so we need to provide tools to support them.”