The Village Voice - December 30, 1998 - January 5, 1999
Mark Schoofs
Dakar, Senegal--"I really trusted my husband," says Brigitte Syamaleuwe, a 40-year-old Zambian woman. She knew she hadn't had sex with anyone else, so when she tested HIV-positive she felt "totally shattered."
Black alternative health-care activists will gather this weekend in Harlem for a contentious conference on AIDS and other infectious diseases that is bound to exacerbate the medical and racial debate in the African American community.
Many people think it's the single greatest victory in AIDS: Giving the drug AZT to pregnant women halves the chance that they will pass on the virus to their newborns.
How great a loss was the death of AIDS researcher Jonathan Mann, killed in the crash of Swissair Flight 111? "I'm convinced that if someone other than Jonathan had been the first director of Global Programme on AIDS, the whole response to the epidemic would have been different," says Peter Piot, one of the earliest HIV researchers and now director of the United Nations AIDS program.
Two years ago, author-activist Larry Kramer had a scare. Kramer is blessed with an extremely low amount of virus in his blood--in lab tests it's undetectable--but suddenly it flared up.
GENEVA--At least three separate research teams here at the 12th World AIDS Conference announced that strains of HIV resistant to many drugs, including the powerful protease inhibitors, have been transmitted from one person to another.
In celebrating a major milestone in AIDS vaccine research last week, the media overlooked a second equally important and closely related advance. Indeed, the second breakthrough could lead more quickly to human studies of experimental vaccines.
I always had fat legs," chuckles HIV-positive AIDS activist Dawn Averitt. But when her brothers said, "Wow, your legs are getting skinny," Averitt didn't feel happy, she felt worried. The only thing she was doing differently was taking one of the powerful protease inhibitor AIDS drugs.
Poe Park, where the poet once lived, is a sliver of green that runs for just a block along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, but the park attracts a crowd.
This information is designed to support, not replace, the relationship that exists between you and your doctor.