Rates of infection remain high in the gay community—in Chicagoland and across the nation

LIVING WITH HIV

For Chris Stueber, a gay 26-year-old who lives in Rogers Park, staying HIV-negative is worth the hassle. He said he uses condoms, reads up on the risks and gets an HIV test every six months. But Stueber said many of his friends and acquaintances aren't so vigilant about preventing HIV, the virus once dreaded as an inevitable precursor to AIDS.

All too often, Stueber said, young men talk of having unprotected sex without questioning HIV status, figuring that odds are they'll eventually contract HIV anyway—and if they do, they can manage it with medication.

"The thinking is, 'There's a pill for that,'" Stueber said, noting that ubiquitous ads for HIV medications send mixed messages. "It's gotten to be mainstream."

Twenty-six years after HIV and AIDS were first spotted in the U.S., proceeding to decimate gay communities and kill hundreds of thousands more who contracted the disease through heterosexual sex, injection drug use or blood transfusions, better treatment options are allowing people to manage their infection as a chronic illness rather than succumb to it as a terminal disease.

Although treatment progress is undeniably a good thing (since anti-retroviral therapy came on the market in 1995, deaths from AIDS have dropped from a high of more than 50,000 per year to about 17,000 per year today), it may be one of several reasons why HIV infection rates remain staggeringly high in the gay community—in Chicago and nationwide—compared to other populations. About 45 percent of the 2,000 new HIV and AIDS cases diagnosed in Chicago each year are from men having sex with men, which has been constant over the last few years. Heterosexual sex accounts for about 14 percent of HIV/AIDS diagnoses while HIV among injection drug users has steadily declined, according to data from the Chicago Department of Public Health.

While the proportion of gay men with AIDS has declined considerably since the start of the epidemic, when they accounted for 85 percent of AIDS cases nationwide, gay men continue to be the most affected by HIV/AIDS. A five-city study conducted in 2004 and 2005 found that a quarter of gay men are HIV-positive, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As World AIDS Day approaches on Saturday, there is widespread awareness that the key to avoiding sexually transmitted HIV—the most common kind—is to avoid unprotected sex. So why does HIV remain such a scourge? Jim Pickett, director of advocacy at the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, believes gay men have been "terribly neglected" in the fight against HIV because most prevention programs focus on condom use and fail to address broader emotional issues.

Read the rest, and take a look at a great video interview with a young, gay black man living with HIV named Reginald Davis, in the Red Eye - the commuter newspaper of the Chicago Tribune.