What a bang the year 2001 has brought thus far in regards to the pandemic of HIV/AIDS, especially for people of African decent here in the United States and our brothas and sistas in South America, the Caribbean and of course the African Motherland. Under the Clinton Administration last year, January 2000, Vice President Al Gore stated " ... the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all of the decades of the 20th century." Later on in the year President Clinton decreed that HIV/AIDS was a matter of national security.
I think that the world's global economy has felt the rippling wave effect of the AIDS pandemic. AIDS has decimated workforces in some countries and millions of children have been left as orphans due to AIDS; some of those very children now have to deal with their own lives as HIV-positive individuals along with the social stigma one lives with who is HIV-positive.
The first two-months of 2001 have put activists back on red alert. The new White House Administration under President Bush announced it would be closing the Office of National AIDS Policy and the Office of the President's Initiative for One America ( Race Relations ) , offices that were created under former president Bill Clinton. Some of us found clarity after a serious soul searching, while others still need to come out of darkness about HIV/AIDS. Those of us who are living with HIV, those who have been affected by HIV/AIDS, the torch carriers, and activists know the truth.
Chief of Staff Andrew Card made the announcement of the closing of the offices and it sent a clear message to the American People that AIDS was over and that is far from the truth! Like we really don't have any problems with race in the U.S.? That's just like saying that the War on Drug is over, that there is no problem with crack cocaine and other recreational substances all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender are abusing in the U.S. Fortunately, President Bush cleaned up the ugly mess by releasing a statement from himself as well as through his press secretary Ari Fleischer that the offices will continue under the Bush Administration and that Mr. Card's statement was made in error.
Well, OK, it's a good thing that Bush cleaned up the mess but it leaves me personally thinking how much truth was there in the initiative to close those offices in the first place? If our long-time torch carriers, activists, and new generations of both hadn't made noise about this would they have just closed the offices? This incident is the clearest point of clarity that we cannot become complacent about HIV/AIDS in communities of color, especially those of us who are of African descent where statistics and personal revelations have shown that AIDS is far from over!
In 2000, I devoted two columns to shattering the denial about HIV/AIDS in the African American community, "Searching for Clarity" and "A Point of Clarity" in the May and August issues of BLACKlines. In those columns I stated that too many of our people are in darkness, slipping in and out of denial while some are bathing in it. I also stated that despite some media hype, HIV is alive and rippling throughout African American communities and has the potential to wipe out future generations of our people.
There is still no place on the planet earth that has reported a case of HIV infection that can say that the spread has stopped! HIV left untreated progresses to AIDS and you die, ugly but true. I had the pleasure of being proved wrong with the mass media this year, in that they are reporting that HIV is still alive and kicking. That it is ravaging the African continent, African American communities and our Latino brothas and sistas is South America and the Caribbean where there are both people of Latin and African decent.
This February, the 8th Annual Retrovirus Conference was held here in Chicago. Many reports and new statistics about HIV/AIDS came out of the conference. One of the most alarming was a report from the Centers for Disease Control ( CDC ) stating that an alarming 30% of young African American men, and 15 % of Latino men in six large urban cities of the U.S. are infected with HIV. That's like at least one man out of three for our brothas of African decent. If you just think about your daily routine and count the number of African American men you see, it's clarity slapping one in the face! There are an estimated 70% of men who don't even know that they are infected with HIV. There are too many of our people who are socio-economically disenfranchised. Where taking an HIV antibody test would be something toward the bottom of a list of life priorities. Some have to be concerned about their children and if they'll have a roof over their heads, and what will there be to eat, on any given day.
Many individuals believe that living with HIV has become more manageable due to the more than 15 drugs used to combat the virus in the body. The truth is that some patients have already gone through all current medicines due to drug failure or resistant virus. It has been reported that 14% of newly infected people living with HIV have some form of resistant virus and that 4% of them have contracted HIV that is resistant to more that one of the drugs currently available. What is frightening is the significant amount of individuals who are failing their drug regimens and are transmitting their virus either knowingly or unknowingly to others. The CDC will be launching a new initiative soon to reach out to individuals who live with HIV, in order to prevent them from spreading the virus utilizing a one-on-one counseling approach.
June 2001 will mark the 20th anniversary of reports to the CDC about five gay men developing PCP and later linking those men to others as they discovered the cause being HIV. Since 1981, 60 million people worldwide have been infected with HIV. As of 2000 there have been a reported 5.3 million new infections, three million deaths due to AIDS last year with 80% of those numbers coming from the African Motherland. The largest numbers come from Africa but the second highest numbers are coming from South America and the Caribbean. The U.S. has the third largest concentration of people of African decent. I think that the devastation seems to be following the old slave trade routes and where the largest numbers of people of color are concentrated. I say this because the second highest concentrations of people of African decent are located in those regions. The loss of life due to HIV/AIDS will soon rival the lives lost during the great Atlantic Slave trade or what has also been called the Black Holocaust. Do we really need to see such a thing in even greater proportions than was estimated with an event that happened nearly 500 years ago?
Thankfully the mass media is reporting what is truly happening now. If people of color don't continue to rally together, our present administration just might try to pull something right over our eyes. Local health departments across our country are trying to implement new ways of stopping the spread of HIV but they can't do the job alone. HIV is preventable. It's good that the denial is starting to shatter, but we must collectively do our part by talking to one another, especially our youth, and being active participants to the best of our ability in our healthcare management.
It's a known fact that some Community Based Organizations on the frontlines of the epidemic and the health/political administrations were slow in changing their attitudes in outreaching to communities of color. A lot has changed over the years, in some cases they had to because funding was made available to specifically reach out to the disenfranchised African American and Latino communities. There are some great African American and Latino CBO's doing wonderful work reaching out to their own. The Chicago Department of Public Health has made great strides, especially under the leadership of Frank Oldham, former assistant commissioner in charge of the STD/ HIV/AIDS office. Oldham was one of those torch-carrying activists who blazed a trail and has many other great folk in place to continue the work of slowing the effects of HIV/AIDS.
The Black Church, an entity that many have blamed over the years as resistant to educating its congregations, is becoming more proactive in HIV/AIDS education. Thanks in part to the efforts of many, including The Balm in Gilead, a national organization sponsoring many events across the U.S. in harmony with the Black Church. Does your church have an HIV/AIDS ministry or know about The Balm in Gilead? If not, visit their website at www.balmingilead.org or call tollfree, 1-888-225-6243. If you're interested in finding HIV support services and testing sites, check out the resource guide or advertisers in WCT/BLACKlines. Another option is to call the State of Illinois HIV/AIDS STD Hotline at 1-800-AID-AIDS for English and Spanish counselors who can tell you about all kinds of resources. The National Hotline number is 1-800-342-2437 for English and 1-800-344-7432 for Spanish-speaking callers.
HIV/AIDS isn't over. We've found a lot of clarity by coming out of denial or stepping out of our comfort zones over the past 20 years. We owe it to the generations that follow us to create rippling waves of knowledge, love and understanding for our people, and for ourselves. We cannot become complacent.
We can look to the past so that we can protect the future.