I'm sick of correcting people about Mr. Boy dying. Oh, so he died of cancer? Well, no, but cancer killed him. He died of AIDS. The kind of cancer he had is rarely fatal for those with "normal" immune systems, but the 2-year survival rate for HIV+ folks who get it (because of HIV) is 50%. But we still don't like to say people died of AIDS. A long illness, or the secondary cause of death does better, because then we can live in the illusion that AIDS isn't scary anymore. We can live in the illusion that health care is good enough that as long as HIV+ people have access to it they will be healthy for an indefinite period, and it won't be AIDS that they die of, but something else, and we can protect ourselves from infection. And we can live in the illusion that there's no longer a stigma about being HIV+.
Maybe it's that I've had a positive partner, or more than "my fair share" of people in my social circle who are positive, that makes me so sensitive to this. In the US, 1.1 million people are HIV+. There are more than 315 million people in the US. 1.1 million people represents about one third of one percent of the population. About 20% of my social circle is positive, and this was also true before I knew Mr. Boy. In 2010, more than 15,000 Americans died of AIDS. In 2013, three people in my social circle (including Mr. Boy) died of AIDS.
But the stigma of AIDS is still prevalent in our society. When I was read as a gay man walking down the street with Mr. Boy, the assumptions of AIDS on people's faces was easily readable. And in news stories, the assumptions between the lines make me crazy. There was recently an article in the New York Times shaming gay men for not taking Truvada as a preventative measure. And the small piece about Walter Reed blood samples getting mixed up and what Walter Reed is doing to try to find a positive patient is full of stigma. In the article, the person is assumed to be infecting others through unprotected sex or sharing needles, because the author assumed the risk of having someone who has HIV and does not know it must be elucidated for the reader. The biggest segment of new infections of the disease is actually the monogamous partners of males who are not monogamous, contracted through heterosexual sex. Maybe the author knows more about the patient details than I do, but if so, the details should be put to help finding the patient, not toward creating a scare of one HIV+ person who does not know she is. The CDC estimates almost 1 in 6 positive folks don't know.they are positive, totalling to almost two hundred thousand people. If that's your story, make it your story, but otherwise, make the story about the inability of military hospitals and their private contractors to maintain accurate patient data.
