Funding
Testing

James Grissom
HIV Positive
Steve Sherman
Coordinator, NC AIDS Drug Assistance Program
Peter Leone, M.D.
Medical Director, HIV/STD Prevention & Care Branch
Fred Wiggins
HIV Positive
Milford Evans
Benefits Advocate
Bart Haynes, M.D.
Director, Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology, part of the National Institutes of Health

Acute HIV Testing
AIDS Funding
AIDS Research
AIDS Volunteers

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How significant is socioeconomic status in the spread of HIV?
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Most of our people are below the federal poverty level, well, over 90 percent of them. They have trouble sometimes paying their bills, anything from paying bills to medication. Some of them have Medicaid, but it also requires they have a copayment for medications. I assist them in doing that as well as paying their rent, light bills, assisting them with food, a variety of things that they need.

What I see as far as the epidemic in my office, it's not so much black and white. It's again, money or lack thereof. Most people that come in there, like I said, are below the poverty level, and as an average, or as a whole blacks are on the lower part of what I guess you'd call the food chain. They tend to be people that are below the poverty level.

They come to my office for condoms because they don't have it in their budget to buy condoms. They don't. We need more support. We need more funding. We just need more people to be interested.

People are living much longer with this disease now, which has significant implications.
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We did a count, and I think all of last year - people talk about people that are dying - well things have changed. In all of last year out of the Durham office itself, we had a record of four deaths, but we also had a record of over 120 intakes.

People are living with this because of the medical providers, the resources, and the knowledge that they're gaining. People are living more and more with this, and you have some people that have been infected for years but they didn't know it.

Yeah, it's growing. It's growing. I've done just about four intakes just yesterday alone. I think total last month I think I did about eight, and when you compare that to the number of mortalities, it's just awesome. It can be overwhelming at times.

It's hard to describe. It's hard to describe. Sometimes the place is like Grand Central Station. People are coming in and out, and people are standing there talking. Someone will have wanted this and they wanted it yesterday, then you've got other people saying I've been sitting here for 20 minutes waiting. And it can be awesome. It can be very awesome. It just requires a lot of patience and a lot of understanding that when a lot of them do come in, if they're waiting 20 minutes, a lot of them don't feel good, it can seem to them like they've been waiting two hours, so with a little patience and understanding you get through it.

What else contributes to the spread of HIV?
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When someone is suffering from addiction, an active addiction, of course you're not going to make wise decisions, and of course you're going to do things to get the drugs, which goes without saying. So addiction and alcoholism, they are big contributing factors in what's going on.

The majority of our clients, new clients, are between 25 and 44 years old, and I think a lot of people in the 25 year old bracket they think that you can get it, you're not going to die, it's manageable, but they don't understand the regimen they have to go through. They don't have a clue. Once they see the pills they have to take and the doctor's appointments they have to keep up and sometimes just being tired from this disease.. it may be manageable, but it sure can't be a lot of fun to go through. Yeah, I've heard that so many times, that they blow it off, it's manageable, it'll be okay. But if you get it, if you suffer from it, you truly suffer, so don't kid yourself.