World AIDS Day: Sasha Smith

Atlanta recently had our annual Aids Walk at Piedmont Park (our equivalent of Central Park) in October 2009. It was a beautiful fall day and hundreds of people were out to support the cause. One of the many AIDS Awareness events there was a huge AIDS quilt. I was with a friend who pointed out that most of the quilts had dates that were marked in the 1990's. We had a long discussion about why that is. I viewed it as positive thing.  My friend Sarah and I discussed  why we thought we didn't see too many 2000's. Our conclusion was people were surviving longer and less people dying in mass quantities in the United States, or our country has become immune to the AIDS discussion and we just didn't talk about it as much anymore. I'm not sure what the statistics are from the 80's of people dying from AIDS but I do know they definitely weren't living as long as people are living now.

My partner and I were just discussing Magic Johnson last week. He is the ultimate poster child for surviving and living a healthy life with AIDS (as well as the character of Robin Scorpio on my favorite soap opera, General Hospital.) My major point of concern for the AIDS epidemic is the rest of the world. A young woman blogger like myself in the Congo is probably not able to say the same things about the progress of medicine and people living with AIDS. Our health and science technology for saving lives is much more advanced than most countries and is not spreading quick enough to the rest of the undeveloped world. This past Sunday on Meet the Press, Bill and Melinda Gates were talking about this same issue. They discussed the need for science and technology to spread to the rest of the world to help fight disease. One of The Gates Family Foundation guiding principles is that science and technology can help save lives around the world. They claimed that they are committed to their philanthropy efforts on educating folks in the health science field. Their hope is that new scientists will spread all over the continents to save lives.

AIDS is devastating disease that has a lot of controversial history. At this point, we need to move forward and make sure that we are not losing more people to AIDS and not just in the US. We do really need to consider the theme of "Universal Access and Human Rights." Can we really say that we are making a true commitment to those all over the world? When we start talking about giving access to treatment and care to those more privileged and not allowing access to the less privileges this is definitely a human rights issue.

I'm proud to live in the city of Atlanta, where the annual Interfaith Prayer Breakfast features a keynote address by Kenneth R. Overberg from Xavier University in Cincinnati. Events in the city will range from free AIDS testing to poetry and honoring the one's that have been lost. It will be a good day of education and remembrance.

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