• Joe Siegel

On October 2, hundreds of people will participate in the Walk for Life, one of the biggest annual fundraisers for HIV/AIDS. The purpose of the Walk for Life is to raise awareness as well as money, which allows AIDS Project Rhode Island to continue to provide our community with the vital services and education needed to combat HIV/AIDS.

This year the theme of the Walk for Life is “Take Charge! Get Tested!” and the goal is to promote HIV testing among all Rhode Islanders who may be at risk for HIV.

“People are still dying from this disease,” said Dr. Josiah Rich, an attending physician at Miriam Hospital in Providence and a Professor of Medicine at Brown University.

Rich, who has been treating people with HIV for more than two decades, said the epidemic underwent a “miraculous transformation” in the 1990s. After a decade when AIDS claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands, it soon became a chronic, treatable disease, thanks to a slew of new medications.

In the past few years, however, the rate of HIV transmission by men who have sex with men (MSM) has skyrocketed. “We need to do more HIV testing,” Rich said, noting that a high percentage of the population with HIV remain unaware of their diagnosis. “We still have people showing up at the clinic in the late stages of the disease, never knowing they were infected,” Rich noted.

Rich believes there is still a stigma surrounding HIV. That, and what he calls a sex-drenched culture, are factors in people deciding to engage in risky behaviors and then refusing to get tested. There is also a lack of promotion of safe sex in the media.

“Using condoms is just one thing, but if people get on treatment, the treatment is so effective it reduces transmission to others,” Rich said. “The combination of using condoms and being on treatment is going to stop this epidemic in its tracks. I would like Rhode Island to be the first state in the nation to have everybody tested and everybody in care.”

People in the LGBT community need to collaborate in order to combat the spread of HIV, Rich added. “Everyone in the community has to pull together to address this problem. We need to change the culture to one where it is normal to know your status, to know your partner’s status and to openly discuss how to prevent HIV.”

For more information, go to www.aidsprojectri.org, or call 401-831-5522.