The Fight Against AIDS Continues

A generation apart, a plumber in a T-shirt and a petite senior citizen in a purple felt hat sat next to each other and shared the same story finding out they were HIV positive over 20 years ago.
At a World AIDS Day event at Borough Hall on Friday, the two held candles and sang "Amazing Grace," joining nearly 100 others from the population of over 11,000 Queens residents with HIV and AIDS at a celebration honoring those who are surviving with the disease and remembering the thousands lost.
"Its a struggle being a long-term survivor," said Kenneth Cordova, who used to work as a plumber and now is training to be a peer counselor at the HOPE Program Outreach Project. "Ive had many friends die of AIDS."
With a higher rate of infection than any other county in the state, Queens has become the frontline in the battle against HIV and AIDS, which was the number-one cause of death citywide for women ages 25 to 44 in 2001, according to a recent study. In Queens, there are currently 3,379 women living with HIV/AIDS nearly 67 percent of whom are black and 20 percent Hispanic.
Heterosexual women, once considered a low-risk group when AIDS first appeared in the 1980s, have now become one of the most vulnerable populations.
There was some cause for hope, though. Members of the Queens AIDS Care Network hailed several steps forward in the struggle, including Borough President Helen Marshalls support of a new needle exchange that opened last week in Long Island City.
The exchange will allow injection drug users to trade used needles for new ones in order to reduce needle sharing, attributed as the possible cause of nearly one-quarter of all cases in Queens.
The crowd at Borough Hall was a reminder of the diversity of the population affected by HIV/AIDS in Queens. The small woman seated next to Cordova, who asked that her name not be published, warned, "I had one day of unprotected sex, and see what happened to me?"
sarah@queenscourier.com