World AIDS Day

I haven't written a post for World AIDS Day for a couple of years.  Maybe I should be ashamed that now that HIV is part of my mundane life, I don't get so excited about it.  The good news is that most days I don't need to think about it much.  There have been occasions when I have gotten very excited about it, and I'm sure there will be more.  This World AIDS Day what I would like is for everyone that reads this post to take a minute and do a mental check on your response to HIV.  If you knew there was a child at your child's school that had HIV, how would you feel?  Would you be comfortable having someone over for dinner that you knew was HIV+?  Do you think HIV+ people can have "normal families?"

I ask you to consider this not to make you uncomfortable or annoyed, but to cause you to think.  What do you know about HIV?  If someone made a comment about people living with HIV, could you answer them intelligently?  I do understand that most of us don't ever need to think about HIV.  Why should you care if HIV+ people can have families?  The reason you should care is because they are your neighbors, maybe literally, maybe figuratively.  You should care because so many people still know so little about the disease and how the management of it has changed in the last few years.  You should care because you may have an opportunity to educate someone else.  You should care because it takes so little time and research to know a lot more about it than most people do.

I recently had a friend ask me about whether or not my children would be able to have children of their own.  Someone had told her that mothers would always pass HIV on to their children.  This was an educated person in the business of education.  I was surprised mostly by the fact that she was so willing to pass on this misinformation without checking out the truth of the statement.  I'll admit I couldn't quote accurate statistics as to the percentage of women that have transmitted to their children, but I could tell her she was wrong, and needed to check her facts before making statements like that.  Those are the kinds of conversations that get me excited.  Nurses that don't want to handle my children, and are obviously uncomfortable having us as patients get me excited.  Really folks, it is 2011, do a little reading.

The very short blurb on my sidebar hits the high points.  HIV is not transmissible by casual contact.  People who are on medication often have undetectable viral loads, which means that the risk of them transmitting even in high risk situations is almost zero.  Mothers on medication DO NOT transmit the virus to their babies.  Our Infectious Disease Specialist told me that he couldn't say the chance is zero, but in his 15 years working with all of the western United States he knew of 3 cases, and all of them had extreme circumstances.  The reason they can't say that the chance of a mother passing the virus to her baby is zero, is that there are so few women with HIV having babies in the United States that they can't do enough studies to make that claim.  The bottom line, you cannot "catch" HIV from someone you are in casual contact with.

My challenge to you today is to take 5 minutes and do a little reading.  In that 5 minutes you may learn something new about HIV.  You may find that you have misperceptions that need to be updated.  You may find that you have an opportunity to pass on a little good information to someone else.  Here are a few suggestions:   WebMD, living and coping,  POZ magazine,  Red Ribbon Diaries article on disclosure, or just google "living with HIV".  If you would like a little more reading try picking up a copy of Abraham Verghese's book My Own Country.  Just pick one, and spend a few minutes educating yourself about HIV.  You never know when the topic might come up, and you might have the opportunity to fight the stigma surrounding the disease.  Do it as a public service, do it to make the world a better place for my kids, do it so that you can say you learned something new today.