Numb3ring the Positive

UPDATE: This article won honorable mention in the Ryan White Excellence in Journalism contest! (The 2007 list has not been updated yet!)

Numbers define human life. They tell how many years in a life, minutes in an hour, people in the world, cells in a body, dollars in a bank account and countless other countable figures that identify existence.

Since you've already got so many other numbers in your life, here are some more seemingly meaningless numbers: 25, 39,500,000, 4,300,000 and 2,900,000.
Let's take the first number, twenty-five. That's the number of years since HIV/AIDS (Human Immunodeficiency Syndrome) became an acknowledged world pandemic. Thirty-nine million, five hundred thousand is the number of people who newly tested positive for HIV in 2006. Two million, nine hundred thousand is the number of HIV/AIDS related deaths last year alone.
Perhaps these numbers aren't so "meaningless."

As the deadly virus spreads from one person to another, another tally is tacked on to a rising statistic; person number 6,525,153,392 becomes patient number 39,248,129 of the HIV postive population. Often, though, this person doesn't notice the new force overtaking their immune system. The virus affects each person differently.

Right, my fellow Thespians and I from troupe #4405 created this video to increase HIV/AIDS awareness using a scene from Cathy Sorensen's An Endengered Species: Waking Up.

Exposure spreads through means of unprotected sex, sharing of tattoo or drug injection needles or even from mother to child during pregnancy. In areas of non-AIDS/HIV infected people, blood transfusions are also responsible for the multiplication of the disease. Desperate searches from a supply of donated blood for sickle-cell and hemophilia patients result in a loss of te screening process for infection. These already ailing patients are now infected as well. In its final stage, HIV turns into AIDS, the most critical expression of HIV infectivity, leading to the destruction of white blood cells, or t-cells, that work to kill bacteria and viruses. In a world-society of careless sex, HIV spreads from one infected person to the next, lowering t-cell counts and breaking down immunity barriers; if one person has multiple partners, each of those is exposed. The cycle continues until new numbers show villages, cities and states of HIV-positive populations.
Worse is the fact that HIV/AIDS is most prominent in underdeveloped, poor nations whose concern is first for food, since the know they will never afford the treatment costs.
"The first thing poor families infected by AIDS ask for is not cash or drugs,"* said James Morris, executuve director of the World Food Program. "It is food."
Most of the world's positive population resides in the continent of Africa. From this area are even more numbers increasing by the minute: 11,000,000 and 31.
In sub-Saharan Africa, more than eleven million children are left orphaned by HIV/AIDS. By 2015, it is estimated that the population of Botswana will be thirty-one percent smaller than it would have been in the nonappearance of AIDS.
The United States has its own share of numbers too: 600,000, 35.7 and 27.
Lifetime treatment for HIV/AIDS in the U.S. costs more than $600,000. Most people lose an average of of 35.7 years of their life because of the disease. Of more than a million people infected in the U.S., twenty-seven percent don't know. That means almost three-hundred thousand people don't know that they are spreading the risk of exposure to every partner.
HIV/AIDS is a devestating disease spreading its increasingly influential claws over the lives of people all around the world. Adults, teens and children of all races, beliefs, and sexual preferences are learning how to live with the disease. How does it spread to so many different types of people? Well, a lot of it is sex. Focusing on the teen group alone, a recent study has found that sixty-five percent are sexually active by their high school senior year and twenty percent of those have had four or more partners. Just one unknowingly positive partner can spread the virus to an entire community of sexually active teens. This means that this is a preventable problem; teens can fight the epidemic through safe sex and abstinence.
"AIDS kills," said one man assisting AIDS-affected families in underdeveloped nations. "It's hitting closer to home... AIDS is not only in a particular group or in the poor only; it is everywhere."*
It is hitting home. Even the small retirement county in Florida I live in has some numbers: 9 and 6. The Florida Deartment of Health recognized nine HIV postive cases and six AIDS cases in 2005.
A lifetime of coping with this disease is difficult, but it's looking more positive as treatments become more available. On average, AIDS/HIV positive patients live 24.4 years with the virus, amost three times the life expectancy of 6.8 years in 1993.
"I am and will remain very much alive," said Matt, a young man recently diagnosed HIV postive. "I am each day learning to live positively."
Doctors are seeing more people living with, rather than dying from, AIDS/HIV.
Those are the first of some positive numbers.
*Quotes courtesy of http://www.avert.org and used with permission.