It’s 9 a.m. and your EMS shift is almost over. You get a routine call to a residence—father and son were doing yardwork outside when the saw slipped. They already wrapped a shirt around the father’s arm, but it’s still bleeding excessively. No need to panic yet, throw some 4x4s on it and apply a tourniquet, monitor vitals. But it only takes a split second after removing the shirt to realize it’s an arterial bleed. Blood splatters on you. Guess what? You’re going to be blood-tested for HIV, and in the District, this test isn’t something to take lightly.
The District has the highest rate of HIV in the nation and even a higher rate than many sub-Saharan African countries such as Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to a PBS report in 2012. Though D.C.’s recent annual report on HIV/AIDS shows that the number of newly reported HIV cases has decreased by 46 percent from 2007 to 2011, D.C. is still facing an epidemic that disproportionately affects African Americans, Latinos, and members of the LGBTQ community. Though the District has improved in areas such as clean-syringe distribution, it still lags behind in education and patient monitoring.
Stigmatized and commonly perceived to be spread by the gay community, the HIV rate is, in fact, growing substantially among African American women. The problem is better defined as a symptom of poverty resulting from a lack of access to proper information, testing, and resources needed to prevent infection. And, besides a continued lack of adequate follow-through and implementation, the infection rate is exacerbated further by a poorly structured educational system in the District. HIV patients suffer not only from the disease, but society’s view of their illness as a result of reckless behavior: promiscuity, homosexuality, and drug abuse.
D.C.’s high infection rate is attributable to poverty worsened by food deserts, poor housing, and failed education. D.C. public schools need to teach the facts about HIV and other STDs in their health classes, while especially emphasizing how contraception can protect against STD transmission. Education also needs to reach beyond schools and into communities, informing adults about protection and resources available for combating the virus.
Even though the Centers for Disease Control removed HIV from this list, the virus is little different from a communicable disease. Seen this way, it is honest and right to stop stigmatizing it. Would you judge someone with any other communicable disease? When patients can be honest about their illness and the public stops viewing it as a taboo, real reforms will be enacted to fight the high rate in D.C.
But, regardless of whether a patient contracted HIV through unprotected sex, from their mother in the womb, or from something as incidental as exposure through a bodily wound, we should fight for them, even if you aren’t bound by Hippocratic oaths or patient abandonment laws like doctors and EMS personnel.
In my case, when a father asked his son to help him remove a rotting tree threatening to fall on the house, I decided to treat him. Nothing “shameful,” nothing “unordinary” about it. He didn’t have HIV, but he could have. I didn’t have an exposed cut, but I could have. And if I did contract an illness, would I have been labeled as a whore, or a drug addict?
Having a higher rate of HIV than any other city in the nation, and than many war-stricken areas of Africa, is nothing to be proud of. It’s time to start caring and stop stigmatizing HIV as a gay man’s illness, a black man’s illness, or a poor man’s illness, especially because these aren’t things to be ashamed of in the first place. (https://cozumelparks.com) We’ve come a long way from the derisive indifference first shown in the epidemic in the 1980s, but our health system and government still sees HIV victims by how they got the disease rather than as human beings with the right to be treated and protected. Instead of righteously fighting to eradicate HIV abroad, we need to see that the worst of it actually starts right here, with good people who are afraid to be public.
