Saturday is World Aids Day so I thought I'd take this opportunity to tell you a personal story to kick off to my more traditional method of linking off to women blogging...


In September of this year, four days after my son's 21st birthday, the phone rang at about 8:30 at night. I glanced at the caller ID. It was Chris. I answered with a "Yo Dude, what's up!", like I often do. (It takes the edge off of those requests for money and stuff.) There was silence and then he said...

So, last night I pulled a really late shift, doing some heavy cleaning at "the restaurant", and I got stuck by a needle.

A needle? Err did he mean a hypodermic type syringe needle? He did. That's exactly what my newly minted grown up son was telling me - needle stick. Within seconds I was thinking like every irrational HIV/AIDS message board member I've ever had the pleasure to encounter. My common sense was long shot and it didn't matter one tiny bit that I knew the odds of contracting HIV from this (or Hepatitis for that matter) were incredibly low - my brain and common sense were so totally NOT in charge.

Luckily, I recovered pretty quickly and reassured the kid that while this wasn't great, he still was not in any serious risk of danger. I asked him very specific questions about that needle and we made plans to visit the physician the next day.

He was given Hepatitis B immunizations because neither of us could remember if he'd had them in high school (he was in that border line age, before Hib was required by schools), had blood tests for Hepatitis and HIV done and was offered PEP (Post-exposure Prophylaxis), which he mulled over for 24 hours and decided not to take. Not because the drug was expensive ($800 if you are interested) but because his risk of contracting HIV was low and the risk of serious side effects from the PEP was huge.

It's been almost three months and he's been tested again for both HIV and Hepatitis and is still clean, as he should be from this incident, and there's no reason to believe his next test won't also be clean. We're lucky.

Others, many many others, are not so lucky. Look at the latest HIV statistics.

People living with HIV:
33.2 million people living with HIV worldwide
30.8 million adults
15.4 million women
2.5 million children under 15

New HIV cases in 2007:
2.5 million total new cases
2.1 million adults
420,000 children under 15

HIV-related deaths in 2007:
2.1 million total deaths
1.7 million adult deaths
330,000 deaths among children under 15

Something I didn't expect to find when I was looking for links to HIV information and blogs this week... An alarming HIV spike?

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention is mulling over when to release alarming new statistics showing that as many as 50 percent more people are being infected with HIV each year in the United States than originally reported by the government.

From the Family Equality Council Blog

Every day 6,000 children lose a parent to HIV/AIDS. Decades have gone by and still no cure, and families are still being destroyed and the public push for a cure has waned.

Hillary blogs about a friend who has a passion for raising awareness about HIV/AIDS.

His goal, from the website, is to have 365 people donate $30 towards AIDS relief, with proceeds going to your choice of recipient organizations: The Mennonite Central Committee, The Canadian Red Cross, or the Dr Peter AIDS Foundation.

Ashley is working on a speech for World Aids Day

Even though we've done these before I feel like this one has the most specific subject he's needed to cover, the hardest subject to come up with ideas for and it's the longest.

Before the speeches were just his story about how he got it or about how he lives with it. I really just sort of put it in order and added some snazzy vocabulary.

This time we're going to have to be creative and think about how people lead others in their community and what they can do to help with HIV/AIDS. I have no idea how someone steps up as a leader in a community. I've got nothing. I need to think this through. So that's my new writing project for the next few days. Wish me luck.

Let me leave you with this post from Culture Kitchen: Hurricane of HIV

AND WILL THEY SAY nobody could have foreseen the weakness of the levees?
For the first time, Washington D.C. has collected data on H.I.V. and found that in the nation's capital, the "modern epidemic"—as the Washington Post calls it—is now primarily one affecting blacks.

~~Denise
Flamingo House Happenings