At Week's End; 606; Aids Week Up Date

I don't know if I can do it, but I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it. 8. The terrible plague of the 1980s is once again compelling our attention. In New York City it is already the leading cause of death among women of childbearing age, and in the U .S. alone next year it will be the leading cause of death among women age 15 to 44. Tonight a look at this terrible

plague once the scourge largely of the gay community and how it is spreading to an ever -wider segment of our population, specifically women. Some of the myths about AIDS are that AIDS is happening to somebody else. It's happening to those people over there. It's not happening here. That's the biggie. Because I think that that kind of denial prevents people from changing their behavior. That's one of the things that why adolescents are so at risk through sexual activity because AIDS isn't in New Mexico. There's only a million people in New Mexico. Well Santa Fe has the sixth highest per capita rate of AIDS in the nation. So, you know, it's definitely here and Ivy Drug Use is generational in New Mexico. And New Mexico has the third highest teenage pregnancy rate in the nation.

So there's definitely sexually active teenagers in the state. People are saying, well, I don't want my kids to know about it because if they don't know then they won't get it. Which is exactly the opposite of what the case really is. I think we have to start teaching kids because kids are having sex. Young people are having sex maybe not kids. And they think that they're not going to get it. And the biggest, fastest growing population of people that are getting AIDS are teenagers and women. Ivy Drug users are a fast growing population too. But in general, there's a lot more just middle -class women because of the stigma of it being a gay disease or a disease of somebody that's really promiscuous. People just don't want to hear about it. There's a difference between AIDS and HIV disease. Everybody that has AIDS has the HIV virus. And that's really what's dangerous. AIDS is just a compilation

of certain diseases that you get when your HIV positive and your immune system breaks down. So there are people that have had HIV virus for 12 and 13 years. So you can think you're fine. And that's the thing. You know, there's only only about 100 ,000 cases of AIDS in this country. But there's probably ten times that amount of people who are HIV positive and don't even know it. That's what's really scary. Because of the mechanics of love making, you know, the woman's the receptor. It's like more breakdown of tissues occur and, you know, sperm is deposited inside of her. And so infection is a lot. She's a lot more risk. He's not as much at risk. Not that he's not at risk, but women are dying undiagnosed. They're getting sick. They're ending up with, you know, an AIDS diagnosis, you know, when they could have been diagnosed, HIV positive a long time ago. If a doctor had thought to look for

it. It's going to be a whole new massive effort to try and get testing clinical trials for women. I think it's years and years away. There's just so little available in terms of curing AIDS for anybody that I don't even know if I want to blame make somebody a bad guy about that. I think they're doing the best they can. And because it started out in our society, in men, that's what they were testing. But I hope they open up the trials to women. And when I say drug trials, I mean, if I want to take an experimental drug, I should be able to as a woman. It's not just the impact on the woman, but her all family. Child care costs and if a woman gets sick and has AIDS, then what happens to those kids if she dies? If you make just enough money so that you can barely pay your rent and pay your bills, you're

probably not going to qualify for Medicaid. So I think somebody whose low income is really going to be the most at risk because health care is not going to be the priority. The priority is a shelter in food. AIDS education has to be about self -esteem because I know if I had more self -esteem, I wouldn't have done some of the things I did in the first place. So it's not sex education. It's about liking yourself and being able to say no to say yes to yourself and not doing things that put you at risk. Instead of arguing with some guy about whether I'm going to go to bed with him, if I liked myself more, I might not have not had to argue. I could have just walked away. I definitely have purpose on this planet and meaning and value. It makes it seem like there's not really any big deals. I mean, even AIDS isn't a big deal in a way. It's like, well, I'm alive right now. That's a big deal and I'm really grateful. Joining

me now are two distinguished women who are on the front line of this all -important battle. Martha Trollen, who is an age educator and health planner working with New Mexico AIDS services and the New Mexico Association of People Living with AIDS and Lorraine Compa, a registered nurse working with health care for the homeless, specializing in AIDS education among prostitutes. Welcome to both of you. This is a rather grim but all too necessary subject. I have the feeling that we are witnessing here the fulfillment, an awful fulfillment of prophecy and warning, which we were given repeatedly through the 1980s, that this epidemic would not be confined to the gay community where it's already caused such havoc and suffering, but that it would spread well beyond that into the heterosexual world, particularly to young people and especially to women who are vulnerable. Some of these statistics are shocking. In the next two years, over 500 ,000 new cases of AIDS expected of which 200 ,000 will be women, as many

in the next two years as we have seen in the entire past decade. What's the depth and breadth of the new severity of this epidemic? I mean, also in New Mexico, our number of justice startling. This year we will have 165 cases of AIDS. Now, in terms of the whole country, that seems very small, but it took us eight years, the first eight years of this epidemic, to get our first 165 cases, and now we will have 165 cases. In one year, we are doubling every two years, and that will also mathematically progress. Exponential growth here, which is bound to get worse in the 1990s. Is there a public awareness of this problem? It seems to me that we have somehow fallen back exhausted. We have been numbed by all the awful images of young men dying of AIDS over the last several years at a very

moment when it's become even worse than it was in the 1980s. We seem less conscious, Lorraine. Well, I think there's probably more of a public awareness than there used to be than there has been in the past. New Mexico is not real high on the national level in regard to AIDS cases, and I think that kind of keeps people in the denial level. They think that because New Mexico is pretty low on the national level, that there's not much that they have to do in regard to heterosexual activities. Many people in New Mexico still see it as a homosexual disease. I also like to say that there's a large population of teenagers that are very sexually active. In the homeless clinic that I work in, we see quite a few runaway teenagers, and they're extremely sexually active and don't see it as a problem. I think that's, there's a lot of denial with teenagers

also. But isn't that absolute folly? I mean, Santa Fe is now the sixth highest per capita in the United States in the number of AIDS cases. It exceeds the rates in Los Angeles, in Dallas, in Washington, DC. We know that teenagers, we know that those who now have AIDS between the ages of 20 and 29, a large percentage, 25 or 30 percent of those people developed the disease as teenagers. You're talking about a phenomenon that is much broader than HIV disease. I mean, you're talking about, I mean, this disease hasn't really, in a sense, changed things. It's like putting a magnifying glass on the ills that already exist in our society. So, I mean, people want to deny that death. First of all, we're a culture that's terrified of death. So, I'm not surprised that this is going on. But people don't want to confront their fears of homosexuality. They don't want to deal with sexual issues. They don't want to deal with race issues. They don't want to deal

with the fact that women are the poor in this country, and that women, therefore, women die faster of AIDS because they get treatment later, because they don't get treatment, because they can't pay for it. They are not involved in drug protocols, because I think that scientists are almost as reluctant to deal with women's issues as men are to put on condoms. So, I mean, we're really, and we're talking about race issues. We're talking about the expendable populations in this country, IV drug users. I mean, all of the people that this culture insanely wants to sweep under the rug because we don't want to deal with it, the way we don't want to deal with talking to our children about sex. It's all the same ill. It's as much a problem of sociology and culture as it is of technology. It isn't that we don't perhaps have the medical means. We have a problem here of will and of concern, ultimately of compassion. Right. Of compassion and of acting, of being proactive. We don't do that in other areas of our culture either. But isn't

this likely to change if our many of our straight daughters, now, not just our gay sons or our gay friends, but our straight daughters in a heterosexual world begin to suffer an increasing fatality rate. The people that we consider important, but I mean, and that enrages me too. I mean, it's not important when it's gay people, but it's important when it's straight people. But also, well. I think the reality of what you just said is I think people have to start looking at the reality of who is being infected with the HIV virus. Not only the homosexuals are being infected, it's also women who are our daughters, who are the straight women who are daughters. And I don't think that people will start reacting to that until there's a large, large number of women who are HIV positive. And right now, the, it's growing. The amount of HIV is growing in the female population.

In 1980, in 1990, in New Mexico, there were 1 ,922 neonatles tested for maternal, and that was for maternal antibodies. And those were from women between 25 and 44 years of age, child -bearing age, and three of those tested positive, which is pretty low for the national level. But that was only out of 1 ,922 women that were tested. I think it's... There are special problems here, aren't there? In the treatment of women, they get a later diagnosis, often I've seen statistics here showing that many women with AIDS die six months after a diagnosis, which indicates that they've already got full -blown cases before they ever have seen in any kind of medical help at all. So there's an awful problem here of recognition, it seems to me, of the difficulty. We're not even giving people a chance. There are absolutely no, there's absolutely no research being done

on how major research, like the National Institute of Health, their infectious disease, and allergy, on how HIV manifests in women. There is no part of the list of diseases that will give you an AIDS diagnosis, that has anything to do with any of the genital complications and vaginal complications that have to do with women and AIDS. There is one research project being done on AZT impregnant women, but it's about the baby, it's not about the women. They finally put enough pressure on the people at the National Institute of Health to make it on maternal health, but and on the babies, but it's not on women's health, and women are valued in this culture and as people who bear children and as people who are partners to men, so that this is the only place that we get either recognition or fear. Women are looked at in this epidemic in terms of whether they're going to infect

men as, you know, are preoccupation with prostitution or whether they're going to infect babies. Lorraine, what's the bottom line here? Is it the old plague of discrimination and of prejudice in this society, not only homophobia, but in this case sexism and in New Mexico in particular, a deep -seated cultural aversion to dealing with these problems? There's definitely a lot of discrimination with the women who work on the streets in Albuquerque. 90, I'd say 95 % of these women who work on the streets are there because they absolutely have to work there. For reasons of poverty? For reasons of poverty and also because there's a very high incidence of IV drug abuse, IV drug use, and to back that up, I feel that there is no backup in reference to treatment centers for people with IV drug use. Right now, there's a center in Carlsbad that works primarily with women and their children, but alcoholism is the main

problem they need to deal with, but IV drug use is not used. And in reference to what Diana said in her film, IV drug use is generational here in the state of New Mexico. It's a catch -22, so it's just a vicious cycle here. Many of these women who work on the streets are supporting their habit, their children's habit, and their mothers' habit. So it is multi -generational, and this has never been looked at in the state of New Mexico, and I don't know if anywhere else. Isn't there here an awful irony that as this disease spreads into the heterosexual population, in a sense what's coming home to the straight world of New Mexico and the United States, are the wages of our neglect? Is it going on for so long? Are our initial neglect of the AIDS outbreak because it was among a limited and somewhat ostracized element of the population, but no longer.

Now it's come into into every living room, every bedroom of America, middle class, every ethnic group. Believe me, Roger, there was just as much denial in the gay community as there is in the heterosexual community, and I think that that's part of how we deal as human beings. What should be the main line of attack? Is it prevention? Is it better treatment here? It's all of those. And of course research. It's really creating a healthcare system because we really don't have one in this country. It's a tremendous amount of education, and I would say that the bottom line also has a lot to do with money because all of this takes a tremendous amount of money, but I'm telling you if we deal with some of these problems around HIV, we will have dealt with a lot of problems in this culture that we've had to deal with for a long time, and it's totally worth it. I think education is at most important, and for people to be willing to listen to people with HIV, who are infected with HIV, and also who have the AIDS disease.

I hope that our audience has been willing to listen to you too. You've been quite wonderful, and I'm in courage just by hearing what you have to say. Thank you so much, Mark the troll on, and thank you, Lorraine Compa. For weeks in, I'm Roger Moore. For more information about AIDS, call the AIDS hotline at 1 -800 -342 -2437. If you would like to express your comments, please write. At Weeksend in Care of K -N -M -E -T -V -1130 University Boulevard Northeast, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87102. For a cassette copy of this at Weeksend program, send $35, which include shipping and handling to K -N -M -E -T -V -1200 University Boulevard Northeast, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87102, or call 1 -800 -328 -5663. Instead of arguing with some guy about whether I'm going to go to bed with him, if I liked myself

more, I might not have had a argue I could have just walked away. I definitely have purpose on this planet, meaning and value. It makes us seem like there's not really any big deals. You know, I mean, even AIDS isn't a big deal in a way. It's like, well, I'm alive right now and that's a big deal and I'm really grateful.