HIV/AIDS Still a Public Health Priority

My earliest forays into social justice activism were through HIV/AIDS awareness. When I was 12, my mom - a nurse at the public Boston City Hospital - took my best friend and I to see the AIDS quilt, which still fit in a single room back then. From the mid-80s forward, I took to covering my walls and school locker with Keith Haring ads, stickers that reminded us, "Silence = Death." (Did I even know the depth of its message at the time?) And for a decade now I've worn a wrist cuff with the AIDS ribbon on the side of it. Protest via consumerism, I know; hardly the most demonstrative message.

But like so many Americans, with the exception of my daily bracelet reminder, I don't think too much about the AIDS epidemic these days. Which is very troubling, considering it remains exactly that - an epidemic, that's now increasingly infecting black women (via), and people on the economic fringes - including low-income individuals, sex workers, and prisoners. Unsurprisingly, it's too often that when crises reach these marginalized groups, they suddenly stop feeling like a crisis - to the rest of us. The rates of infection in DC rival that of East Africa - and are on the rise, whether through drug use or sex (gay or straight).

When we talk about poverty and health, we often talk about obesity, diabetes, hypertension, lack of access to medical care, restricted access to abortion, unaffordable medicines - including contraception, mental illness, physical disability, and limited education and information on protecting oneself sexually. We lament the babies born out of wedlock. Yet, resulting in all of this is another chilling outcome - the rates of HIV infection that spread in poor communities from unprotected sex - whether because women can't afford to protect themselves, don't know exactly how, can't due to gender inequality (i.e., men controlling women's bodies), or choose not to due to the complicated, fateful desire to surrender one's body to another. (Is this late night writing or what?) Men sleeping with men on the d.l. increases women's risk for infection, usually without their knowledge. And so on.

HIV/AIDS has sadly become a manageable disease in this country as long as one has ACCESS to a lifetime regimen of medications and healthcare. This can be quite a luxury in low-income communities, where both stigma and fear/willful ignorance, along with lack of access to doctors, reduce rates of testing. I'm writing this at the tail end of World AIDS Day here in Boston. Let's never forget that "World" includes the US. Too many of us have written off HIV/AIDS as a global - i.e., faraway, overseas, not-in-my-backyard - problem. But it is in our backyard. HIV/AIDS is killing Americans in our nation's capital, and in our cities and poor communities nationwide. Learn more about HIV/AIDS and poverty in the US and consider taking action today - by volunteering with or donating to groups that serve people living with HIV/AIDS, or by supporting HIV/AIDS research. You can even let your computer do the work.

(Photo by slicknick1986)