No Longer a Death Sentence, AIDS Has Lost Power to Scare

Donna Sweet, a Wichita doctor nationally known for her work with HIV and AIDS patients, saw only 20 of those patients die last year.

Twenty out of 900.

But the medical advances that are helping her patients live longer have led some people to take unnecessary risks with HIV, which is most commonly transmitted through sexual contact and sharing syringes and needles.

Some people, Sweet says, think: "Why should I mess up my fun now when they can just fix me later?"
Awareness of the seriousness of HIV has dropped because "they're not seeing people get sick and die," Sweet said. "There's no more 'Rock Hudson's dead!' You don't see people with black spots on their faces. You're not seeing the wasting. We're taking care of these people."

In the late 1980s and early '90s, the disease was much more visible, Sweet says.

"If nothing else, young people didn't want to look like that," she says. "That's when people were dying some pretty miserable deaths."

With medical advances, the mortality rate started dropping dramatically in the mid-1990s. It's a different disease now, she says.

Patients who get good care and take care of themselves can expect to live 30 years with HIV, Sweet said.

Many people still think of AIDS as a "homosexual disease," because that demographic has been hard hit in the past 25 years.

"The group that doesn't think about it is the heterosexuals, especially women," Sweet said. About 80 percent of new infections in women are happening because of heterosexual unprotected intercourse.

"Drugs are still a factor some, but not necessarily injection drugs," she said. "People can do a lot of sexual things under the influence. Cocaine and meth use have fueled the epidemic. People are also trading sex for drugs."

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended last year that every person between 13 and 64 who's been sexually active get an HIV test.

The drop in AIDS awareness makes it harder to provide care and services to people who are HIV positive, Sweet and others say.

"Our population is growing, and our funding is not," Sweet said. "Fundraising is hard. There are lots of different diseases. This one has fallen off the radar screen. We struggle constantly to make sure our patients have what they need."

Positive Directions is the only nonprofit group in Wichita that specifically serves HIV and AIDS patients. The organization that started in 1991 in a church basement with a $5,000 donation from a mother whose son had died of AIDS served 215 clients last year.

Debi Kreutzman is the Daily Bread coordinator, making sure clients are fed via the group's food bank on Emporia just north of Douglas and meal delivery to those who are homebound.

Case managers help clients get low-cost housing and other benefits. Volunteers help with transportation and respite care.

Positive Directions also provides community HIV prevention education and testing.