AIDS numbers going against us ( 2003-08-04 13:38) (Agencies)
Of the estimated 875,500
people who have developed AIDS in the United States since that dread diagnosis
came along, roughly 56 per cent have died. Some 385,000 are alive and coping
with the disease.
Many more are certain to develop it. An estimated 850,000 to 950,000
Americans are already infected with the precursor virus, HIV.
US progress against AIDS is marked by how close we can come to freezing those
numbers -- and what we learned last week is that we aren't anywhere close. The
US Centers for Disease Control announced that new AIDS cases jumped from 41,227
diagnosed in 2001 to 42,136 in 2002. That increase sounds slight but it's
alarming to epidemiologists. It shows that the trend is in the wrong direction.
Particularly disturbing is the estimated 7.1 per cent increase in HIV
infections among gay and bisexual men. It's the third year in a row that this
number has risen, suggesting that vigilance has relaxed. Complacency is sparking
a resurgence of this terrible disease.
The wider public may find this baffling. An unrealistic expectation prevails
that education about AIDS can just be delivered once and the message should sink
in. But of course it doesn't work that way. Many young gay men today haven't
experienced the bedside vigils, the wasting-away of their friends and
never-ending funerals that made an older generation vigilant.
The availability of medicines to stall AIDS has led younger men to see the
disease as something survivable, maybe even not so terrible. This is what Thomas
Bruner, executive director of the Cascade AIDS Project, calls "treatment
optimism," and it's among a number of delusions that help to buoy denial.
What Bruner also sees is: classic youthful invincibility;
it's-going-to-get-me-anyway fatalism; and some genuine confusion among some
people with HIV or AIDS that they can't pass the disease along if they still
feel healthy.
Last year, the Cascade AIDS Project provided services to 1,591 people
infected with HIV or with full-blown AIDS. Most, about 1,300, live in the
Portland metropolitan area, and roughly two-thirds are gay or bisexual men.
Although our area has not yet seen a national-level surge in HIV infections,
syphilis cases among gay men have quadrupled here. That's an unsafe-sex
indicator that typically signals a surge of HIV infections ahead.
If people expected a magical stopping point when the education process was
finished, they were wrong, says Bruner. There's a new target audience,
previously too young or just not listening, tuning in all the time.
AIDS remains a disease without a cure. The new numbers show that the campaign
against the disease -- our effort to outwit it via education -- has to be
continually renewed and reinforced.
