A disease's grim legacy 25 years after AIDS was officially recognized as a disease

A disease's grim legacy 25 years after AIDS was officially recognized as a disease, World AIDS Day will be observed around Chicago with events that show its deadly impact hasn't gone away
By Charles Sheehan
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
Published December 1, 2006


When Chuck Hyde started tending bar 25 years ago at a nightclub on Chicago's North Side, word began to arrive from California that a horrifying new disease was killing gay men by the scores.

Now a managing partner of the Sidetrack nightclub, an institution in the heart of Chicago's gay community, Hyde recently leaned against the mahogany bar and recalled the hundreds of customers, employees and friends who have died from the illness that came to be known as AIDS.

Hyde hopes that Friday's observance of World Aids Day will serve as a reminder of the estimated worldwide death toll of 25 million men, women and children--more than 550,000 of them Americans--since the disease was officially recognized in 1981.

"It's a great awareness event for the rest of the world. But AIDS never leaves us here, really," Hyde said. "I can't imagine there is anyone out there that hasn't been affected by AIDS, but it doesn't seem to matter. The world clearly still needs reminding."

Among the dozens of events marking the event locally, the City of Chicago will offer free AIDS testing at nine sites--in grocery stores, barber shops and beauty salons. In Glenview, marchers will call on the U.S. government to increase annual funding for AIDS programs to $5 billion. And in Schaumburg, two panels of the AIDS quilt will be displayed at the Illinois Institute of Art-Schaumburg.

Activists plan to rally outside the White House on Friday, the day the federal government will launch a new HIV/AIDS Web site, www.aids.gov. The site will provide information on prevention, testing and treatment.

The event will be observed everywhere from Argentina, where public discussions will be held, to Amsterdam, where street demonstrations are scheduled.

For more than a decade, the U.S. has recorded about 40,000 new infections each year, and about 1,000 of those infections are from the Chicago area, statistics show.

The map of the free testing sites--most of them are in Latino and African-American neighborhoods--reflects the changing face of AIDS, which is increasingly a "disease of color," said Mark Ishaug, executive director of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago.

There is growing frustration, he said, that the number of infections remains steady.

"We know that the public dollars have not kept pace if you look at Chicago, where there are 1,000 new infections each year," Ishaug said. "The state has put millions into new prevention programs. But on the federal level, there has been no new money for AIDS prevention."

On the Far South Side, Ida Byther-Smith scrapes together state and city grants and whatever private donations she can to fund Joray House, a shelter for people with AIDS or HIV, the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

The stigma of the disease in African-American and Latino communities remains as strong as it was on Nov. 7, 1991, the day Byther-Smith learned her husband had infected her, she said.

"I was going to kill myself," said Byther-Smith, 57. "A married, black Christian woman. I wouldn't hug my babies. I couldn't talk about it in church."

Byther-Smith took herbs to combat the disease and did not see a doctor until 2000 when she became seriously ill.

"What made me act like that, that ignorance, is still here," she said. "We're 25 years into this virus and it makes me cry that this stigma still exists."

The AIDS rate among African-Americans in Chicago was 44.6 per 100,000 in 2004, more than three times the rate for whites, according to the Chicago Department of Public Health.

As Byther-Smith makes numerous speaking appearances on Friday, Jaime Delgado will shuttle among the free AIDS-testing sites, many of them in Latino communities.

Delgado, services director for the Community Outreach Intervention Project at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said there are unique hurdles to combat the disease in Latino neighborhoods.

"These are migratory communities, and often when someone gets ill they go home to Puerto Rico or to Mexico," he said. "Add that to the number of undocumented [workers] and language, you can get an incomplete picture."

The AIDS rate among Puerto Ricans in Chicago, 26 per 100,000, is second only to that of African-Americans, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a health-care organization in Menlo Park, Calif.

Nationally, Latinos make up 14 percent of the U.S. population, but they account for 20 percent of all people living with AIDS, according to the foundation.

Because the growing Latino population in Chicago includes a large number of adolescents, their communities are at an even greater risk because nearly half of people now infected with HIV are under the age of 25, experts say.

Sidetrack, 3349 N. Halsted St., will hold a fundraiser on Friday for local AIDS organizations. Even in a place where most of the patrons are gay, Hyde said, World AIDS Day is a needed reminder of a tragedy not far removed.

"There are some people who don't think AIDS is a death sentence anymore because of new treatments," he said. "In that atmosphere, I don't think a reminder even once a year can hurt."

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csheehan@tribune.com