Washington Blade - November 30, 2007
Katherine Volin

First came the Blade's Nov. 16 report that the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention was preparing a report showing a possible 50 percent spike in HIV infections nationwide. Then the Washington Post reported that the United Nations had overestimated global AIDS infections rates by as much as 40 percent.

Next came the long overdue assessment of HIV in D.C., which showed that only 25 percent of the infections spread between 2000 and 2006 were transmitted by men having sex with men. More information on the rising statistics of HIV/AIDS among "men who have sex with men" was published Nov. 28 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Since its appearance more than 25 years ago, AIDS has spurned an entire industry that has both critics and supporters.

Ron Simmons has headed Us Helping Us, an organization for black gay men with AIDS, since 1992. He says his organization had long suspected that the CDC's numbers were inaccurate.

"We had a feeling the numbers they were passing out a few years ago weren't quite right," he says, pointing out that the agency had been claiming for several years that infection rates were remaining steady at 40,000, an oddly even number that didn't make sense to him.

"A lot of us are not surprised," Simmons says about the new figures.

UHU's work, which includes testing and support groups, in some ways is unaffected by the shift in the CDC's numbers. The numbers released by the District's HIV/AIDS Administration similarly don't affect his work but reiterate the idea that AIDS knows no sexual orientation, something UHU has been aware of and responding to for nearly a decade, he says.

"It has reinforced our plan to expand our services to the African-American community in general," Simmons says. "A lot of people just know of us as doing gay black men and some know us as only HIV-positive gay black men, and we've been more than that for 10 years now."

The murky waters of sexual orientation and STI convinced Simmons not to ponder whom to serve, but how.

"The crisis is in D.C. and we are a community-based organization, developed in D.C. by the people we serve. Clearly, we need to be here," he says.

BUT HOW DO national organizers and groups grapple with the swirling figures of a bloated AIDS industry?

If you know AIDS activism, you probably know of Michael Petrelis, who was heavily involved with seminal AIDS activism group ACT UP during the '80s. Petrelis continues his brash form of activism via blogging from his San Francisco home.

"I was someone who questioned some U.N. numbers back in 2000 or in 2001 because of how they were estimated [and] projected," Petrelis says. The numbers for Africa and India seemed questionable to him and to Indian health authorities.

"I know that India, for example, long complained that the U.N. was overestimating the infection rate in India, and the Indian health authorities were accused of denying the extent of the problem in their country, and now what we see is that the folks who questioned the numbers were proven right," he says.

From his perspective, the uneven numbers diminish the effectiveness of the prevention message.

"I think we still must question the latest numbers from the World Health Organization," he says. The U.N.'s numbers were based on WHO's reports. "How do we know the current number of HIV infections is really accurate?"

Petrelis says he's concerned that the "screaming fire" approach by the health authorities mitigates their effectiveness at combating AIDS.

"It's kind of like Bush screaming about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and when you don't find the weapons, well, his credibility is pretty much shot," Petrelis says. "I take that same thing and apply it to the AIDS industry. Why are we screaming about infection rates that are exaggerated? Their credibility gets diminished."

FOR REBECCA HAAG, the lesbian leader of AIDS lobbying organization AIDS Action, the statistics demonstrate the nation's inadequate response to the disease.

"We haven't really responded appropriately to the domestic epidemic," Haag says. "We've neglected to develop a really concerted national strategy that could end this epidemic in America."

Haag works as the executive director of the Massachusetts branch of AIDS Action and also serves as the executive director of the D.C. based national AIDS Action Council, a position she's held since 2006. Her corporate background, combined with an masters in non-profit management, makes it no surprise that Haag's idea for a national response to AIDS has a corporate spin.

"We need to take a more business-like approach that says if we want to reduce the number of new infections in the country and we want to set a strategy for that, then what's the à most cost-effective strategy for that," she says.

Despite their differing views on how to approach AIDS, Haag and Petrelis both sense that the nation is at, what Haag terms, a "juncture" with regard to a new national strategy for AIDS.

"On the domestic front right now, there is going to be a new administration, one way or another," she says. "There is a national focus on health care reform and the state of health care in our country, and I think more and more people are looking at HIV/AIDS and trying to decide, what is it? In the early years, it was a crisis because it was a death sentence and nobody knew what caused it."

Now, she says, it's the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 25-34 and is no longer just a gay disease.

"Are we actually going to do something to solve it or are we just going to let it turn into a chronic problem?" she says. "I believe that there's a lot of reason to believe that this is domestically something we can solve and we've got plenty of other problems in the country that have become chronic and there's no need for AIDS to become one of them.

"The reality is there is a solution. We could drastically reduce the number of newly infected. I believe what we need to do is put hope back into the discussion."

According to Petrelis, some of that hope might come in the form of a popular image: the red ribbon.

"Red ribbons are still an effective symbol. I used to be very dismissive of it, but I see it in the category of the pink triangle silence-equals-death thing from ACT UP. These are recognizable symbols that send messages."

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