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Halifax Regional Medical Center marked World AIDS Day by hosting an HIV and AIDS seminar that featured guest speaker J. Wesley Thomas, an area infectious disease specialist working out of Jemsek Research Clinic in Huntersville.
"One out of every 227 Americans has HIV," said Thompson, shocking the crowd gathered in the hospital's auditorium. "It is no longer a 'gay disease,' as more heterosexuals than homosexuals are now infected with HIV and AIDS," he said, adding, "women are the new face of AIDS."
The World AIDS Day theme for 2004 was "Women, Girls, HIV and AIDS." The reason for this focus - women are the fastest growing population infected with AIDS and HIV today.
According to Thompson, women who are HIV positive develop AIDS more rapidly than men and have a higher mortality rate.
Twenty-six Northampton West High School students, most of whom were young women, attended Wednesday's conference along with hospital staff and representatives from various local health organizations and AIDS outreach programs.
The students, all currently taking either Allied Health Science 1 or 2, were chaperoned by their teacher, Delphine Green. Green said the presentation would be helpful to her students, many of whom plan to enter the medical field after graduation.
In his hour-long address, Thompson surprised the audience by stating a recently released fact: 1 in 10 U.S. HIV cases are in people over 50.
"AIDS and HIV aren't popular to talk about so the media has stopped reporting on it, and people have stopped getting tested, so when they do come in they're sicker," said Thompson. Fifty-nine percent of heterosexual adults have not been tested for HIV.
"We need more government commitment, especially for those 45 million Americans without health insurance. And we must get the word out to children, who now outnumber adults in Africa, because of the AIDS epidemic," Thompson said passionately.
Misty Lane, the HIV program coordinator for Halifax and Northampton counties, is currently tracking 170 HIV patients in the Valley. Her organization operates out of HRMC and follows patients who have been diagnosed with HIV while in the hospital. The program provides diverse levels of service to those it treats, from intense case management to friendly reminders about check-ups and taking their medicine.
Treatment has come a long way since 1987, when the FDA approved the first HIV drug. It is a complicated disease, but can now be treated with a combination of two to three drugs taken daily, as opposed to taking 34 to 50 just a few years ago. Thompson spoke on the five classes of HIV drugs available today and the life-extending effects they have on infected patients.
"We still have a long way to go and the guidelines change every six months, because we've only been treating the virus for 15 years," he said. Though new treatment has improved the lives of HIV patients, Thompson added, "there will not be a cure for AIDs in our lifetime, if ever."
HIV and AIDS Facts:
€ HIV, human immunodeficiency virus, is transmitted through sexual contact, blood to blood, breast feeding and intravenous drug use.
€ HIV weakens the immune system and AIDS, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is the last stage of HIV infection.
€ Most people who develop AIDS eventually die from the disease or related conditions.
€ As of 2002, 75.6 out of 100,000 blacks were infected and 8 out of every 100,000 whites had the virus.
€ There are 33,000 North Carolinians currently living with the disease and the state's epidemic is growing.
€ Twenty-five percent of all U.S. cases are in rural counties and the same statistic is true for N.C.
€ It is 10 times more common in blacks than whites, and 3 times more common in Hispanics than whites.
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