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Editor's Letter: Let's Rally Against the Virus but in Support of People Living With It

Editor's Letter: Let's Rally Against the Virus but in Support of People Living With It

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HIV is easier to treat — and prevent — than at any other time in history, but stigma keeps people from treatment.

Every World AIDS Day we come together to celebrate innovations in medicine that have advanced treatment of HIV and lowered the number of related deaths worldwide, to mourn those we’ve lost to complications of the disease, and to project what we need to do in the coming year to make real progress in the fight against HIV and AIDS.

As important as the fight against the virus is the fight for people living with it — to end the stigma and misinformation they live with every single day. A 2014 study from MAC AIDS Fund of American youth ages 12-17 found that 33 percent did not know HIV is a sexually transmitted disease and half of the participants reported being more afraid of getting HIV than cancer. Only half of the teens say they’d treat a friend with HIV “normally” and 13 percent wouldn’t even touch them.

A 2012 Kaiser Family Foundation study found that 27 percent of Americans thought you could acquire HIV by sharing a drinking glass with someone who is positive; 17 percent thought you could catch HIV from a toilet seat; and a remarkable 11 percent still thought they could get the virus by sharing a swimming pool.

That jibes with stories I heard this fall at the U.S. Conference on AIDS, about folks in Mississippi, Alabama, hell, even New York City, whose families refused to eat on the same dishes or to let their children touch their poz aunties and uncles. It’s sad and alarming. We need to change that.

HIV is easier to treat — and prevent — than at any other time in history, but stigma keeps people from treatment. In 2016, Plus is going to look harder at the issues that are keeping so many HIV-positive people out of treatment. And we’re going to bring you voices of people living with HIV, who are combating stigma their way.

So go out, observe World AIDS Day your way, and start thinking about what we need to do in 2016 to knock stigma out!

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Diane Anderson-Minshall

Editor