A Day with HIV is September 22, 2015

posted by Stacie on September 21, 2015 // Comments Off

This post is made possible by support from the Let’s Stop HIV Together campaign. All opinions are my own.

Did you know that HIV and AIDS remain a persistent problem for the United States and countries around the world?

Did you know that about 50,000 people get infected with HIV each year. In 2010, there were around 47,500 new HIV infections in the United States?

About 1.2 million people in the United States were living with HIV at the end of 2012, the most recent year this information was available. Of those people, about 12.8% do not know they are infected. In the United States, about 13,712 people diagnosed with AIDS died in 2012. HIV disease remains a significant cause of death for certain populations. To date, an estimated 658,507 people diagnosed with AIDS in the United States have died.

MORE FACTS ABOUT HIV

Worldwide, there were about 2.1 million new cases of HIV in 2013. About 35 million people are living with HIV around the world, and in 2013, around 12.9 million people living with HIV were receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART). An estimated 1.5 million people died from AIDS-related illnesses in 2013, and an estimated 39 million people with AIDS have died worldwide since the epidemic began. Sub-Saharan Africa bears the biggest burden of HIV/AIDS, with almost 70% of the global total of new HIV infections for 2013. Other regions significantly affected by HIV/AIDS include Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

It seems to me that HIV is something that has sort of been of the fringe of my life since I was a kid. I mean I grew up in the 80's and there was always talk of AIDS and HIV because that is really when it came to the forefront of American culture. That is when we became aware of the devastating effect of AIDS.

For many of us that grew up in the 80's our first experience with AIDS was hearing about Magic Johnson. Depending on what circles we were in as young adults would determine how closely AIDS affected our lives. In the 90's as a college student, I had a few friends who knew someone that was affected or had died from AIDS. When 2000 hit, my mother lost a friend to AIDS and then within a few years, I too lost a friends to AIDS. AIDS was no longer that thing that reached the outer circles of who we knew. AIDS was a part of our everyday lives.

MEET WALTER AND CYNTHIA

Walter and Cynthia both said that it could never happen to them. Walter didn't lead the kind of lifestyle where he could AIDS (his words). Cynthia said that there was no way that she could have AIDS. But the fact is that the face of AIDS could be any one of us. The face of AIDS looks like you and I. It looks like that guy walking down the street or the woman checking out in front of you at the grocery store. The stigma of AIDS has to stop because the fact is that AIDS doesn't discriminate.

A Day with HIV is September 22, 2015. Share the message and support the cause.