Hiv Positive

The models represented by the Proof Positive division of the Morgan Agency have everything models are expected to have: good looks, high-paid jobs and national exposure in advertising campaigns. But they also have something unexpected: They are HIV positive."Sometimes I work with other models and they complain about a pimple or a bad hair day," said Chris Crays, a 30-year-old model who tested positive for HIV seven years ago."That kind of shallowness can be difficult to bear when you're living with a life-threatening illness.

It's not that he has trouble expressing himself in words. After all, at the tender age of 20, he's already written an autobiography. But when he tells his story, as he did recently in Baltimore, the young man from Zimbabwe often points to a painting of his that he brought from Africa. It shows a figure standing at an open door, about to step out of a darkened room and into a place showered in brightness. The meaning isn't hard to grasp. The figure depicts the artist himself, the soft-spoken yet confident Tichaona Mudhobhi.

A new medical clinic for HIV-positive hemophiliacs -- a symbol of recognition to many of its patients -- opens today at Johns Hopkins Hospital.The aim is to provide comprehensive health care to adult hemophiliacs in Maryland who were infected with the human immunodeficiency virus by the blood products meant to help them. The clinic will be staffed jointly by personnel from Hopkins and St. Agnes Hospital."This may be a small clinic, but it's a major thing for these people, and it's long overdue," said Annette Maurits, president of the Maryland chapter of the National Hemophilia Foundation.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - The good news on AIDS: Nearly a million people began life-prolonging drug treatment in developing countries last year. The bad news: 2.5 million people were newly infected with HIV. As new infections continue to far outstrip efforts to treat the sick, the United Nations released a progress report yesterday that highlighted both the notable gains in combating the AIDS epidemic and the daunting scale of what remains to be...

Twenty new cases of the virus that causes AIDS have been diagnosed in Harford County this year, a county official reported to the Harford County Council this week.Thomas M. Thomas, the county's health officer, said 20 Harford residents tested HIV-positive out of some 678 people who were tested this year for the human immunodeficiency virus.That brings to 148 the number of people who tested HIV-positive in Harford since 1981, Mr. Thomas said, and 84 of those people have died.Eighty percent of the people who tested HIV-positive are men.Forty-five percent of the cases have been people between 30 and 39 years old, he said.

THE LATEST United Nations report on AIDS contains some truly horrifying news. In Africa, HIV-positive women for the first time outnumber infected men. This means more and more infants will be born with the incurable virus.The implications will be devastating for South Africa and Zimbabwe, in particular. Life expectancy in southern Africa could soon drop to 45. The result will be labor shortages -- and a crippling burden on society to take care of millions of sick people.The bad news is not limited to sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for two-thirds of the world's HIV-positive people:HIV is spreading explosively in the former Soviet Union, due to intravenous drug use and primitive health conditions.

After writing about many shows on AIDS during the last several years, I was starting to feel as if I had built up a resistance to being affected by them. I feared that I'd been numbed out and wondered if a show on AIDS would ever get through to me again."A Conversation With Magic," which airs at 8 tonight on cable's Nickelodeon channel, got through to me. The half-hour show with basketball legend Earvin "Magic" Johnson talking to a group a kids about AIDS and what it feels like to be HIV positive got through to me like no other shows since HBO's award-winning documentary "The AIDS Quilt" in 1989 and NBC's "An Early Frost" in 1986.

A photo of an attractive woman leaning against a smiling man graces the magazine's cover. Inside are articles on sex, tips on health, essays on coping. The horoscope's on the last page.Sound like many other slick lifestyle magazines? It is, but with a twist: Out last month, this is Plus Voice, a national lifestyle magazine for people who are HIV-positive or are affected in some way by the virus that causes AIDS.And beginning March 15, another magazine, called Poz -- aimed at the same audience -- will appear on selected newsstands.

For the first time in the history of the AIDS epidemic, the number of babies born nationwide with the virus that causes AIDS has leveled off, government researchers say.After increasing sharply in the 1980s, the percentage of childbearing women infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, has remained relatively constant since 1989, the researchers found.The reason is unknown, but in a paper being published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Susan F. Davis and her colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta suggest several possibilities.

NEW YORK -- Martina Navratilova said she plans to contact Magic Johnson to explain her comments this week that public response would be different if she had contracted HIV instead of Johnson."

A Catholic Navy chaplain was sentenced to two years in prison yesterday after admitting that he forced himself on a Naval Academy midshipman, coerced a Marine he was counseling to take nude photos of him and had sex with an Air Force officer without disclosing he was HIV-positive. Lt. Cmdr. John Thomas Matthew Lee, 42, pleaded guilty to 11 charges, including aggravated assault, fraternization, forcible sodomy, conduct unbecoming an officer and wrongful use of his government computer, as part of a plea agreement with prosecutors.

Twenty-five years into the AIDS epidemic and halfway through the initial phase of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, there is increasing international consensus about the need to target women and girls. One area where the U.S. could make a real difference in women's lives has until recently been largely overlooked: integrating HIV/AIDS and reproductive health services. This presents important new opportunities for the U.S. AIDS program to become more effective and sustainable.

Hardship seems to follow Shelton Jackson like a wanton stray dog. He spent a lot of time during his childhood waiting in a park with his brother while his parents bought drugs, he says. His father died of AIDS-related pneumonia, and his mother, who is still a drug user, is HIV-positive. In high school, when he told his family he was gay, they stopped speaking to him. He fell in love at a tender age only to lose his partner to AIDS six years later. He is HIV-positive. He is 28. But there's another story, too. Jackson, an on-again, off-again student at Morgan State University, is funny and excitable.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- The knock at the gate was our gardener, Shephard Moyo. He had come by just to get a ladder, but his pained expression made clear something was terribly wrong. "I have a very big problem," he said, standing in the bright sunshine a couple weeks ago. His cousin's 30-year-old wife had just thrown herself off a fifth-floor balcony in downtown Johannesburg. The day before, she had learned she was HIV-positive. Maybe she was unaware of the potential availability of treatment or could not face the stigma.

At a time when up to 280,000 Americans are unaware they have HIV, screening for the AIDS-causing virus should become a routine part of medical care, two independent research teams have concluded. The scientists found that identifying HIV infections early through expanded testing can add more than a year to an infected patient's life and prevent the disease's spread - at a cost comparable to other common screenings, such as those for breast cancer or high blood pressure. Although federal guidelines call for routine HIV testing in high-risk groups, the new studies say that approach doesn't go far enough.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - When a South African provincial leader promised this week to make AIDS drugs available to all HIV-positive pregnant women to protect their babies from becoming infected, it hardly sounded like a rebellious act. But here in South Africa, where AIDS is as much a political as a medical issue, the announcement was a challenge to the government's much-criticized policy on limiting public access to drugs that fight AIDS. It also made the premier of the province that includes Johannesburg and Pretoria the latest hero in a nationwide movement of politicians, doctors, church leaders and activists to stir the government to take action against its AIDS crisis.

Laurie Purdy surprises people when she shows up to give a speech about AIDS. Tall and attractive, she seems perfectly healthy. She does not look like a person who has been HIV-positive for six years."

An Army private was sentenced yesterday to three years in a military prison after pleading guilty to aggravated assault and other charges for engaging in unprotected sex despite being ordered by the Army to tell sexual partners that she was HIV positive.Pfc. Gerland Squires, a soldier at Aberdeen Proving Ground, will receive a bad conduct discharge, have her rank reduced from private first class to private and forfeit all pay and benefits."I'm sorry, so sorry," the 21-year-old private said, sobbing, just before a seven-member panel sentenced her on charges of aggravated assault, disobeying a superior and making a false statement to investigators.

On the surface Botswana appears to be a success story -- one of the few in post-colonial Africa. The nation of 1.5 million is a parliamentary democracy and its economy, fueled by diamond mining and tourism, is one of the most prosperous in Africa. Botswana gained its independence from Great Britain 34 years ago, and for much of its history, it's served as a model for good government and wise fiscal management -- a bright spot on a continent marred by instability, strife and suffering.

THE LATEST United Nations report on AIDS contains some truly horrifying news. In Africa, HIV-positive women for the first time outnumber infected men. This means more and more infants will be born with the incurable virus.The implications will be devastating for South Africa and Zimbabwe, in particular. Life expectancy in southern Africa could soon drop to 45. The result will be labor shortages -- and a crippling burden on society to take care of millions of sick people.The bad news is not limited to sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for two-thirds of the world's HIV-positive people:HIV is spreading explosively in the former Soviet Union, due to intravenous drug use and primitive health conditions.