Shorter Blogs, The Gay Plague, Rent

Shorter Blogs
I realized after posting my last blog, that it was incredibly long. I am going to make a concerted effort to get to the point more quickly, I promise.

The Gay Plague

If you didn't already know, Tomorrow, December 1, is World AIDS Day. A very personal day for me. The first World AIDS Day was 1988. But this was far from the beginning of the crisis, simply a recognition of it. When HIV/AIDS was first discovered it was immediately labeled the "Gay Plague" because it was showing up only in Gay Men who were sexually active with other men. This began a stigma that is still around today. The biggest problem with calling it the Gay Plague was that it gave heterosexual folks a false belief that they were safe from it.

At the end of the blog, there is a set of stats about the disease in america today, for personal edification, warning, its scary!

I remember commemorating my first World AIDS Day, I was in 8th grade. My mother didn't know what I was going to do after school, (not that she would minded) I just didn't tell anyone. I met some friends, colleagues in my youth/health activism circle in Alamogordo. The first person I had ever known of that died of AIDS had passed away that year, and he was the center of the ceremony so to speak. I have many friends who are HIV positive now, and I love them all dearly. Luckily I have not had to experience a death of AIDS related causes since that 8th gradeyear.

I am reminded of my favourite musical (go see it int eh theatres RIGHT NOW its an amazing movie) and the term we now use for people with AIDS.

PLWA, People Living With AIDS. The line in RENT is "to people living with, living with, LIVING with, not dying from disease"

People living with AIDS

At the end of 2004, the CDC estimates that 415,193 people were living with AIDS in the USA.¹

Of these,

• 35% were white
• 43% were black
• 20% were Hispanic
• 1% were of other race/ethnicity.

Of the adults and adolescents² with AIDS, 77% were men. Of these men,

• 58% were men who had sex with men (MSM)
• 21% were injection drug users (IDU)
• 11% were exposed through heterosexual contact
• 8% were both MSM and IDU.

Of the 93,566 adult and adolescent women with AIDS,

• 64% were exposed through heterosexual contact
• 34% were exposed through injection drug use.

An estimated 3,927 children were living with AIDS at the end of 2004, of whom 97% probably acquired the infection from their mothers.

Exposure category	2004 diagnoses			Cumulative diagnoses
	Male	Female	Total	Male	Female	Total
Male-to-male sexual contact	17,691	-	17,691	441,380	-	441,380
Injection drug use	5,968	3,184	9,152	176,162	72,651	248,813
Male-to-male sexual contact and injection drug use	1,920	-	1,920	64,833	-	64,833
Heterosexual contact	5,149	7,979	13,128	59,939	99,175	159,114
Other/risk not identified	298	279	577	14,085	6,636	20,721
Total*	31,024	11,442	42,466	756,399	178,463	934,862

http://www.avert.org/media/pdfs/world_aids_day_quiz.pdf