And So It Goes ... Happy AIDS Day Everyone!

By SETH MYDANS - via The New York Times
Published: October 13, 2009

AN NHON TAY, Vietnam — The first day of school was a special one last month for the 15 children from the Mai Hoa orphanage here. They are infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, and for the first time they would be allowed to attend the local primary school. “The children were so excited,” said Sister Nguyen Thi Bao, who runs the orphanage and had been lobbying for three years to enroll them in the government school. “They had been wishing for this day to come.”

But when they arrived, they found an uprising by the parents of the other students, who refused to let their children enter the school together with the infected orphans. Some of the parents hastily backed away when the orphans walked past.

After a short standoff, the principal, who had agreed to accept the orphans, told Sister Bao that their papers were not in order and that they could not stay.

The children returned to the orphanage, just a short walk down a country road, where they continue to study in small classrooms, still exiled from the uninfected world.

... About 290,000 people in Vietnam, a country of 86 million, carry H.I.V. today, and Mr. Murphy said that although the rate of increase was slowing, the infection was spreading outside high-risk groups.

Among those infected, the government estimates that 5,100 are children. Although the law requires equal treatment, almost none of them have been accepted in schools because of the fears of other children’s parents, Nguyen Vinh Hien, the deputy minister of education, said last month.

read the story here.

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By Todd A. Heywood 11/10/09 -via The Michigan Messenger


An HIV-positive Macomb County (Michigan) man is facing charges created under Michigan’s 2004 terrorism laws for biting another man in a neighborhood scuffle. That, HIV advocates, state lawmakers and legal experts say is “cowardly” and “nonsense” and increases ignorance and stigma surrounding the virus.

...“Is this a dangerous instrumentality? It’s like saying that because I breathed on you and I have tuberculosis and we are fighting, that somehow because I have this disease it suddenly becomes more than just that I have this disease,” said Meadows, a former assistant attorney general. “The other charges are more than sufficient to deal with the issues involved.”

HIV experts say it is a near impossibility to spread HIV through a human bite.

“Even if you accepted that as a transmission case,” said Catherine Hanssens, executive director of the New York City-based Center for HIV Law and Policy. The charges against Allen, she said, simply aren’t warranted. “It’s just nonsense. It’s cowardly. It’s the kind of thing that keeps kids [with HIV] out of day care and camps and allows kids [with HIV] to be kicked out of karate case.”

She said cases like Allen’s are proof that the nation is failing to address the epidemic with common sense. “It’s continuing the boogey-man characterization of people with HIV,” she said.

read the story here.

Nice WAD

Did AIDS Change America?
By John-Manuel Andriote



More than 500,000 people have died from AIDS-related illnesses in the US in the last 27 years - but has AIDS really changed the country?

The actor Paul Michael Glaser, who presents a Radio 2 documentary on the subject on Tuesday, has no doubt it has had a tremendous impact at a personal level.

Best known as Starsky in the long-running television show "Starsky & Hutch," Glaser said: "AIDS had a huge impact on my life and on hundreds of thousands of my fellow Americans."

Glaser's own wife, Elizabeth contracted HIV, which causes AIDS, from a blood tranfusion in 1981 - the year AIDS was first reported in the US.

"The fact that no one could pinpoint exactly where the illness was stemming from led to confusion and a certain amount of panic.

Elizabeth and her daughter later died from AIDS-related causes.

Among the archival and new interviews used in the documentary, Elizabeth Glaser's speech to the 1992 Democratic National Convention raised issues still being raised in 2008.

"Do you know how much my AIDS care costs?," she asked.

"Over $40,000 a year. This is not the America I was raised to be proud of, where rich people get care and drugs that poor people can't. We need health care for all."

By the end of 2005, nearly one million Americans had been diagnosed with HIV-AIDS since it was first seen among a handful of young gay men in 1981, according to the most recent figures from the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC).

But the figures do not begin to reveal the personal pain those who have been affected have experienced, or the prejudice they have had to endure.

Neither do they shine a light on the huge progress that has been made in managing - if not yet curing - HIV infection.

Early panic

In the early 1980s, Glaser remembers society took time to adjust to the new menace: "The fact that no one could pinpoint exactly where the illness was stemming from led to confusion and a certain amount of panic."

High-profile actors, performers and athletic stars, such as Rock Hudson, Liberace and Ervin "Magic" Johnson, and the involvement of celebrities such as actress Elizabeth Taylor, helped stem that initial panic.

A teenage boy from Indiana called Ryan White, who contracted HIV from blood products used to treat his hemophilia, also played a big part in changing attitudes.

He showed Americans what it was like to live with the health challenges and social stigma of having what many considered a "gay disease."

After his death in 1990, the federal government passed the Ryan White CARE Act, today a $2 billion program funding HIV-AIDS care and support programs.

Gay community hard hit

Without doubt, AIDS has inflicted a terrible toll on the gay community.

America's best-known AIDS activist Larry Kramer recalls: "I had kept a list of how many I knew, and when it reached 500, I stopped keeping the list.

"All of my friends, everybody was dead."

Cleve Jones, a San Francisco gay activist and co-founder of the city's first Aids service organisation, was outraged that friends and families "were too ashamed" to acknowledge the cause of their loved one's death.

Jones formed the AIDS Memorial Quilt in 1987 as a way of memorializing the fallen.

Today the quilt includes more than 40,000 panels for those killed by AIDS - but that represents fewer than one in 12 of those who have died from the disease in the US alone.

The tide began to turn against HIV-AIDS in 1996, when combinations of drugs were reported to have tremendous effects.

By 1998, San Francisco's gay community newspaper Bay Area Reporter made headlines across the country with its own headline: "No obits."

Lowered guard

With the promise of effective treatment, many lowered their guard against HIV, believing the expensive, toxic drugs would save them if necessary.

The upshot has been increasing new HIV infections, particularly among young African-American men.

Dr Marjorie Hill is director of New York's Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), the world's first AIDS service and education organization founded by Larry Kramer and a small group of gay men.

She notes a CDC study which found 46% of a sample of young African-American gay and bisexual men were HIV-positive.

"That's outrageous," she said. "That's unconscionable."

"We're not going out of business - because unfortunately business is booming."

Profound yet incomplete changes

If the US has not become completely accepting of people affected by HIV-AIDS, there have certainly been profound changes in the lives of those affected personally, in the gay community and in society at large.

The greater visibility of gay people in mainstream culture, and a more tolerant attitude in society has helped.

I have spent half my life reporting on the impact of AIDS in America and AIDS has certainly brought a new level of maturity to many gay people.

We had to learn what integrity means and to be yourself and not be apologetic about who you are as a gay person even when surrounded by straight people.

People with HIV today are more involved in managing their own medical care.

And AIDS advocates have struggled to ensure that people with HIV and those with other illnesses participate as advisors, and not as mere "subjects," in medical research.

Carries a stigma

But despite greater awareness, HIV still carries tremendous stigma in America.

People within the gay community are judging each other based on HIV status
Bob Bowers

Dr Hill said nearly half the women in a GMHC support group have not told their families they are HIV-positive.

She said: "They said if I told my family, my niece and nephew would not be allowed to come eat at my house.

"This is 2008. That attitude is ridiculous."

Yet it persists among many gay people, too.

Bob Bowers is a straight man who has lived with HIV for more than 20 years.

He said: "People within the gay community are judging each other based on HIV status."

He notes that if an HIV-positive man asks a "neggie" for a date, "they are not even going to consider it."

Assumptions still made

For many, including some medical professionals, HIV-AIDS continues to be associated with people who "look" a particular way, live in certain parts of town, and have a non-heterosexual orientation.

Dr Hill said: "I'm an African-American woman living in New York.

"In New York black women are nine times more likely to die of HIV than white women.

"I have never had a medical provider ask me if I would like an HIV test."

The question must be asked again: Has AIDS really changed America?

The answer is yes.... but.

Yes it has had profound changes, but it depends on whom and which aspects of the country you are talking about.

John-Manuel Andriote is a former Washington Post journalist who has been writing and researching HIV/AIDS for more than 20 years. His former partner died of AIDS in the 1990s and he has been HIV positive himself since 2005.

How Aids Changed America is broadcast on 2 December at 2230 GMT on BBC Radio 2.

AIDS- It's Not Just For Breakfast Anymore

The following facts and statistics from the international AIDS charity AVERT.


In 1981, the United States of America became the first country to identify AIDS as a distinct condition. Since then many thousands have become infected, and by the end of 2005, more than half a million people had died of AIDS in America – the equivalent of the entire population of Las Vegas. There are currently more than one million people living with HIV in America and around a quarter of those are unaware of their infection, which presents a high risk of onward transmission for future partners.

Yet the USA has no formal AIDS strategy, and thousands of uninsured Americans struggle to access good HIV care and antiretroviral therapy. The world’s biggest donor of AIDS-related funding is itself facing a major, ongoing AIDS epidemic, and the situation grows worse each year.

There are also variations in the geographical distribution of AIDS cases across the USA. Once an epidemic that was concentrated mainly in the gay populations on the East and West coasts, AIDS has also now taken hold within Black and Latino communities in many Southern states. The map on the right shows how AIDS cases were distributed across the US in 2005.

New AIDS cases across the US, 2005 (brown = highest concentration, light yellow = lowest)








The USA has no national prevention strategy or prevention targets. Prevention initiatives that actively work to prevent people becoming infected tend to be carried out on a state- or city-wide level, either by local authorities, or by HIV support organizations. Such prevention initiatives may concentrate on particular communities or groups of people, or they may be more general in their focus. Independent organizations play a particularly big role in preventing HIV among injecting drug users, as it is illegal for federal money (and occasionally state or city money) to be used for needle exchange programs.

One area where prevention efforts have successful in the US is the prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT). Routine HIV testing for pregnant women in many states, and good treatment and care, means that diagnoses of HIV in babies have dropped dramatically since HIV was first discovered in the US.

In other areas, prevention efforts have had less of an effect however, and while combination antiretroviral treatment has helped to dramatically reduce the number of people developing and dying of AIDS in America, overall, around 40,000 continue to be diagnosed with AIDS every year. This suggests that HIV infection levels are not declining.

In September 2007, over 100 AIDS organizations joined together to call for the introduction of a National AIDS Strategy that would set out a clear national prevention plan and bring an end to the 40,000 new infections that occur each year. The campaign targets the candidates for the 2008 presidential election.

“The wealthiest nation in the world is failing its own people in responding to the AIDS epidemic at home. Our country must develop what it asks of other nations it supports in combating AIDS: a comprehensive national strategy to achieve improved and more equitable results."- Rebecca Haag, Executive Director of AIDS Action.