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Keeping the topic alive

As AIDS diagnoses decrease, many say the fight cannot.

By ROBBYN MITCHELL
Published July 9, 2006

For 20 years, Keith Edwards had heard the horror stories. As a gay man, his friends were going through it, but it didn't make him more cautious.

Despite all the warnings, Edwards contracted HIV after having unprotected sex in July 2004.

Unaware of his illness, he started to feel a change in his body.

"I was becoming more and more tired, and I usually get bronchitis a couple of times a year, but I had gotten it many more times," Edwards said.

In November 2004, a week after his 44th birthday, he was summoned to Pinellas Care, a clinic in St. Petersburg, and told he had the virus. He noticed the distinctive silence among the faces he'd seen there many times before.

"They told me I had HIV, and I was depressed and sad but at the same time I was ready because then I knew what I was fighting against," said Edwards, now 45 and living in the Old Northeast neighborhood of St. Petersburg.

Edwards was one of the 217 HIV/AIDS cases reported in 2004. That number decreased 51 percent through May, which marked the 25th anniversary of the epidemic. There are 2,898 infected residents in Pinellas County.

Lorene Maddox, a data analyst with the Florida Department of Health's HIV/AIDS Bureau, credits the success to more frequent testing.

"There has been a big push statewide to get people to get tested and educated, and that along with community programs may be the reason for the decrease in diagnoses statewide by 3 percent," Maddox said.

When the first AIDS diagnosis hit the United States in 1981, Pinellas County only had one reported case and no deaths, according to the Department of Health's Office of Vital Statistics.

Maddox said that those numbers don't correctly paint the picture of the immediate effect of AIDS. Numbers from 1981 to 1998 cannot be compared to more recent ones because the classification of HIV/AIDS-related deaths has changed. In the past, far more frequently, if a person died before being diagnosed, the death was attributed to an illness like pneumonia.

But between 1981 and 1998 in Pinellas, the snowball effect of the epidemic was evident nonetheless. In the 17-year span, Pinellas reportedly lost 1,505 residents to the disease.

The numbers used to be entirely white gay men but in recent years have included black heterosexual men and women and black gay men, said William Harper of the AIDS Services Association of Pinellas.

The organization, formerly known as the AIDS Community Project, began in 1987 in response to the death toll, which tripled between 1985 and 1986. Now, ASAP's three offices, one in Clearwater and two in St. Petersburg, offer support groups, testing and preventive education.

ASAP, the first organization of its size in Pinellas, has case managers, counselors and a food pantry for low-income people who are infected.

Harper came to the Tampa Bay area from rural Georgia with a background in ministry, a fact he said that drew him to this cause.

"I heard about the job (of case managing) through a church that I had joined, and when I got there and heard some of the stories, I knew that this too was a ministry," Harper said.

The atrocities that patients were suffering because of a lack of money for proper care were sobering, Harper recalled.

One young man who came to the organization homeless, hungry and HIV-positive for many years is an example that has kept Harper in the business for 10 years. He helped the man get treated, educated and employed.

"He is now a very productive maintenance man, and seeing that dramatic turnaround helped me realize that this was a job worth doing."

Others jumped into the fight against AIDS for more personal reasons.

April Wardlow lost her brother to AIDS and has been part of the cause ever since. As director of the AIDS Partnership of Pinellas, she's setting her sights on a group that Harper agrees may be the most at risk.

"Youth are the biggest problem right now, Wardlow said. "They are unaware that oral sex is still sex, and they are not protecting themselves as they should."

But she contends that APP, which has two full-time and two part-time staffers, has a mixture of clients.

"I would say that everybody is affected by AIDS," Wardlow said. "For a while it lost a lot of attention, but it's my mission to get it back into the forefront because people are still being infected."

She said the dropoff in the push for awareness is because of the decrease in deaths.

"Just because more people are living with HIV/AIDS doesn't mean that it's curable," Wardlow said. "Young people think that you can just take medication for it and be okay, but that's not true."

Edwards, who is a board member of APP and a testing counselor for ASAP, knows firsthand.

Though he has a supportive family that helps him deal with his disease, he recognizes that HIV is very much an individual fight.

"It is a maintenance battle, a battle to maintain physically and emotionally," he said. "It depends on the person whether they will fight or succumb to the disease."

To keep the numbers decreasing, Edwards has but one piece of advice: "Protect yourself and get tested. That's really what everyone needs to do."

[Last modified July 8, 2006, 23:43:13]