It was November 1994 when Carolyn Massey suffered a horrible cold that brought her to a doctor.
She was shocked to learn that she had been infected with HIV, the same virus that had led to her 35-year-old brother's death a year earlier.
As the 52-year-old mother of two sat recently at the kitchen table of her Laurel home, she described the pain and frustration after learning that she had contracted the virus from the man she had been in relationship with for a decade.
"I was in denial and angry and ignorant for about a year," she said. "Back then it was considered to be a gay white man's disease."
Some 15 years later, Massey is using her experience to educate others about the virus that has touched her life so intimately. Massey, along with 19 other community leaders, government officials and health professionals, was appointed recently by Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold to serve on the county's first HIV/AIDS Commission - a board charged with examining the disease and brainstorming ways to combat it.
"HIV and AIDS is still a serious matter that we're going to continue to address," Leopold said.
The commission, which held its first meeting last month, is thought to be the first of its kind in a suburban Maryland county. Baltimore City has a similar organization.
Anne Arundel County Councilman Daryl Jones introduced legislation late last year to form the board. Jones said the district he represents, in the northern part of the county, has become highly affected by the disease, in part because of its proximity to Baltimore.
In 2006, the most recent year for which figures are available, there were 56 new cases of HIV reported in Anne Arundel County, and 40 new AIDS cases. That same year, almost 1,000 people in the county reported living with either HIV or AIDS, according to the latest statistics from the Maryland AIDS Administration.
Maryland, which ranks 19th in the country in population, has the ninth highest number of cumulative AIDS cases (more than 20,000 through 2006), according to the Maryland AIDS Administration. The state sees about 2,100 new infections each year.
"It's pretty much what I would classify as having the potential to reach epidemic proportions," Jones said, noting that Baltimore has the second highest AIDS case report rate of any major metropolitan area in the United States.
