On the eve of World AIDS Day, we mark 33 years the world has experienced HIV. In all this time, we have learned a lot about the immune system, we have seen shifts in how the virus is treated, we have seen people living longer with the virus, but we have not seen a significant shift in how people living with HIV are being treated by society.
After all these years, the stigma of living with HIV has not gone away. In countries where HIV is endemic, there are still fears that even looking at a person with HIV will transmit the virus. In Western countries, the fear and loathing of HIV dampens efforts to educate the population about the virus. Criminalization keeps people living with HIV in a state of fear: back in the closet, isolated and afraid.
The truth about HIV is far less frightening than the panic surrounding it.
Most people who are newly diagnosed with HIV most likely contracted it from a person who didn’t know they carried the virus. About 25 per cent of people infected with HIV aren’t aware of their status.
In the earlier days of AIDS, there was a lot more education about the illness and its transmission. With the advent of better medications, that education has dried up to a trickle. People who are at risk for contracting the virus are not offered adequate information about their personal sexual or drug-using choices. People who are aware of their status are less likely to put partners at risk, despite the common idea that people living with HIV are somehow predatory “vectors of disease.”
A two-year study showed that HIV-negative partners of HIV-positive people whose viral load is undetectable remain uninfected, even when the couples engage in unprotected sex. HIV is not that easy to contract. However, fear and ignorance are much easier to spread, and the result is hatred and a malignancy that are difficult to extract.
Some might suggest that people with HIV have an agenda in trying to get society to think differently about the illness and those living with it. Yes, there is an agenda. The agenda is one of seeking understanding and eliminating the persistent ignorance that demonizes those of us living with the virus.
The agenda is one of seeking a compassionate response to HIV, not a knee-jerk reaction that stigmatizes people who never sought to become infected.
The agenda is one of spreading information that will lead people who are not infected to continue to make healthy choices and take responsibility for their personal behaviours.
The agenda is one where love is a cherished value of our culture and where love replaces the fear that keeps people living with HIV in perpetual shadows that stifle lives and voices.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, we saw too many bright, vibrant and talented people lost. Those ghosts are among us today, reminding us to be aware and awake. When we lose the memories of those men, women and children, when they become mere whispers, we might see HIV take hold again and lose even more loving, brilliant lives.
Charles Dickens said it well in A Christmas Carol: “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy. For on his brow I see that written which is doom.”
We can continue to live in ignorance of that which we do not understand, or we can seek to learn from a place of clarity and compassion. I hope for the sake of all of us that we choose the latter, and cease the propagation of fear that twists people living with HIV into anything less than valuable members of the communities in which we live.
Michael Yoder is the facilitator of POZitively Connected, a program of the Vancouver Island Persons Living with HIV/AIDS Society.
