SARASOTA – Thursday was World AIDS Day, and though the disease doesn't strike fear into people as it once did, health officials say it's still a serious problem. More than 50,000 Americans get HIV every year, and Florida leads the country in new cases of the disease.
Those numbers are part of why there still is a World AIDS Day. But this being the holiday season, there are people who consider it a day to celebrate. They include one Suncoast woman who got the death sentence that an HIV diagnosis once was.
“Who needs sunscreen?” Valerie Wojciechowicz used to say. “I'm never going to have wrinkles.”
She had good reason to have such an outlook when she learned she had HIV in 1991. Doctors told her she had no more than 18 months to live. “So don't make any long-term plans,” she remembers one saying.
It was 10 years earlier when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported five homosexual men in Los Angeles with a rare form of pneumonia. Soon what some newspapers labeled the “Gay Plague” had an official name – AIDS, caused by a virus that defied treatment by mutating.
If you got it, you were as good as dead.
Advances in medicine have turned the sure death sentence into a serious illness, but one patients could live with. “At this point it's really a diagnosis of a chronic illness,” says Tanya Schreibman, M.D., who treats HIV and AIDS patients at the Comprehensive Care Center in Sarasota.
New drugs mean patients can live for decades after diagnosis, but that blessing for people who have HIV can be a curse for those who don't but face the risk.
“That is a major concern of ours because a lot of people have become complacent because HIV is not the flavor of the month any more,” says Serena Miller, an HIV educator with the Comprehensive Care Center.
The CDC reports that more than 50,000 Americans get HIV every year and Florida leads the country in new cases of the disease. Manatee County has the 5th highest rate of infection in the state, Miller says. Sarasota County ranks 12th among Florida's 67 counties.
Health officials say anyone at-risk should get tested for HIV. Of the 1.2 million Americans who have it, more than one-fifth of them do not know it.
Valerie Wojciechowicz shares the fear that people don't respect the disease as they once did. She says the recently completed a 165-mile charity bike ride from Miami to Key West she made is a testament to her good health. But she says paying for medicine or enduring its side effects of nausea, vomiting and diarrhea is no picnic. And she says she's lost jobs and medical insurance when people found out she had HIV.
Its stigma is still strong.
“We do have a completely different hope,” she says. “But it's still not a life that I would wish on anyone.”
For more information on stopping HIV, visit the Centers For Disease Control website.
