ONENET - January 3, 1994
Azarnoff, Martin

- Conservative estimates are that one in every 250 Americans carries HIV.

- AIDS is now the third leading cause of death among all adults between the ages of 25 and 44. In many areas of the country-- including the cities near OneNet Los Altos--it is the number one leading cause of death of men in that age group.

- The fastest rate of new infection is among adolescent women, who get it from unprotected heterosexual sex.

- Estimates from the World Health Organization are that the year 2,000 will see 110 million people infected with HIV. Forty million of those will have AIDS, and 40 percent of those people (about the population of Canada today) will be women and children.

"Truly I say unto you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me. Jesus' parable of the sheep and goats. Matthew 25:32,45"

"What?" you say. "Another story about AIDS!" Well, I want you to know that this story isn't exactly about acquired immune deficiency syn- drome. I mean it is, but this story is mainly about Sister Mary Elizabeth. AIDS is exacting a tragic toll in our communities. Upwards of 14 million people are already infected worldwide. In America one in 250 people are believed to be infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), the virus we see in people with AIDS. Sadly, while messages about prevention abound, people continue to become infected.

Today in the United States, adolescent women of color are becoming infected at a faster rate than anyone else, and they are getting infected from unprotected heterosexual sex. The scope of the epidemic is staggering. Twelve years into this epidemic we still have no cure and hundreds of thousands of Americans have already died from AIDS. Until a cure is found, the only effective weapon in the fight against AIDS is education.

I am the moderator of the HIV/AIDS conference here on OneNet and a staunch proponent of education. I invite you to our conference, where you'll find a plethora of HIV and AIDS information at your beck and download. It was in my search for accurate information to bring to the OneNet community that I met Sister Mary Elizabeth, the system operator of the AIDS Education General Information System (AEGIS) in San Juan Capistrano, California. Sister Mary Elizabeth is one of the people dedicated to halting this pandemic. And Sister Mary Elizabeth has a story to tell.

When she was eight years old, Sister Mary Elizabeth proudly announced to her parents that she wanted to be a nun. "They promptly put me in a Baptist church," she recalls, with a chuckle in her voice. Today you will find Sister Mary Elizabeth running the AIDS Education General Information System (AEGIS), an electronic bulletin board dedicated to educating people about HIV and AIDS. Established in 1992, AEGIS/San Juan Capistrano is operated by the Sisters of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, an Episcopalian community, where it's predecessor, the HIV/AIDS Info BBS, began in 1990. AEGIS links dedicated AIDS electronic bulletin boards globally, encouraging communities to work together in the fight against AIDS.

A free-access electronic network for communication and exchange of HIV-AIDS information, AEGIS "connects four-fifths of the world through its links with other networks," Sister Mary Elizabeth extols. "I talk to people all over the world. I'll get up in the morning and someone from Russia has left a message. Or someone from Uganda, or Australia. Last night someone from Zimbabwe was asking for help using the Internet to get information. It's an exciting time." In her voice alone you sense the dedication and vitality of Sister Mary Elizabeth.

"This is the first thing I've ever done I feel totally committed to. Everything else was just a job," she says. She'll tell you, with that same quiet conviction, that the idea of running a computer-based AIDS-only bulletin board system occurred to while she was tending cows in a rural Missouri town of 1,014 people.

The nearest hospital was close to 40 miles away. The town barely got the TV signals from the national networks. Some of the townsfolk had cable, but there was nothing on the farms. The superannuated telephone system used old-fashioned party lines--where up to five people shared one phone line. There were HIV positive people living in that town, too, "but if you were HIV-positive and wanted information, you had to call out on a single-line pay phone," she says. "Doing otherwise was a quick way to get your farm burned to the ground."

A solution to this peculiar brand of information isolation occurred to her when she returned to California. "I figured the one way to get information in and let people maintain their privacy would be a computer system. The worst that happens is someone picks up the line and hears a rush of noise. Maybe someone would get disconnected, but their privacy is maintained." Two electronic information services, Compuserve and Dialog, already existed but there was either no HIV information or the service was too expensive. "My vision," she says, "was to make a free access bulletin board with anonymous logon." That vision manifested in 1990 when the nascent AEGIS went on-line as the HIV/AIDS Info BBS with a lowly 40 megabyte hard drive. Capacity was quickly doubled to an 80 megabyte drive . Rather soon thereafter a generous businessman from Japan donated a one gigabyte system, which still serves as the core hardware.

"People began to be aware that we existed. It was a chance conversation on FidoNet that led to connecting with a bulletin board in Seattle and another in Denver," she remembers. From there it mushroomed. AEGIS now connects with HIVnet in Amsterdam and APC/Greennet in London, which connects sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Nurturing AEGIS along has been hard work. Sister Mary Elizabeth is up a 4:30 a.m., retrieving recent articles and bulletins from the federal computers on the East coast. She scans them, catalogs them and uploads them to the IBM-based system that is AEGIS.

Sister Mary Elizabeth is fond of talking about her community. Not only the small community of sisters with whom she works, but the much larger community she meets on the network. "I meet so many people from so many walks of life. Not just people in the United States, but Canadians, Australians, Europeans, Africans, Asians. People of much different cultures from mine and yours. I've been learning that it's more than accepting people and the differences we perceive, but acknowledging that we are all different and that we must celebrate those differences."

Many of the people she meets do have one thing in common. They are infected with HIV, and tragically most people who are HIV positive go on to develop AIDS and die. "You become accustom to someone's handle, their writing style, their voice," she muses. "How did Data put it, `My neural pathways have become accustom to you.' Then all of a sudden there is silence. Another bright star in the heavens has gone away."

It is people like Sister Mary Elizabeth who are making headway against AIDS. She reminds us that if we're going to win out over this little virus, then we're going to have to do it together. "I want people to remember that we are all human. That we all share responsibility in this world for each other. There is only one race, the human race."

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Copyright © 1994 - Reproduced courtesy of copyright owner - listed on source line.

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