The Reality Of HIV in 1999 From a news story by 7/15/99
With a new HIV infection every seventeen hours in San Francisco the crisis continues. The number one cause: complacency. Dr. James Kahn works at U.C. San Francisco, "Perhaps all the information about the new medications has made HIV, living with HIV a less scary proposition. But I think that that's only a very shortsighted insight." Dr. Lawrence Goldyn says, "People DO tend to get complacent, and we are touting the fact that we now have, at least in the U.S where people can afford medications, a manageable chronic disease. As soon as you tell people that they say, 'Well it's ok to get it.'" Another reason is that young people who were not around during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980's have not personally witnessed what AIDS can do. Dr. Jeremy Berge says, "If you look back five or 6 years ago AIDS was very evident everyone was losing friends. There were a lot of sick people walking around the street. Now you see people buffed up, feeling healthy. You're not aware that they're ill. So the younger people are losing the concept that this is a life threatening illness, They still could be infected." Now AIDS has a new target, America's third world, poor, minority women. Federal figures show the growth of AIDS among women is three times that of men. Since 1992 the number of male AIDS patients went up 82-percent; women nearly tripled. Hazel Betsey is an AIDS Patient, "We're always at the bottom of the totem pole, women are. We always have to fight harder to get what we want." Drug combinations, so called cocktails radically improved lives and life expectancy. But they've got to be taken exactly on schedule. And so many HIV patients are drug users or homeless that have little discipline in their lives and or structure to their days. Dr. James Kahn of U.C. San Francisco says, "All of these contribute to the fact that fifty percent of our patients are failing with these complicated regimens." Doctors find themselves unable to help those who need help the most.
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