Growing up in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, I was taught, either explicitly or implicitly, that HIV/AIDS was about "them".   In words and imagines that I would never repeat, I was given the message that HIV/AIDS was happening to people who where somehow not humans.

These messages never sat well with me.  Especially when I grew older and began to be touched by HIV/AIDS personally.   Friends and acquaintances began contracting this disease.  Humans beings, one and all, got were infected from every source. 

Finally, eventually, education started to catch up.  And then research.   After years of fear, we began to see a positive trend.  From a dramatically high number of new cases in the 80s, education and research had brought the number down significantly by the early/mid 90s.  A general feeling of complacency seemed to set in with both the media and society in general.  The issue seemed to be largely forgotten.  And the infection rates have continues to remain basically the same for the last two decades.

I remember my friends and those we lost that I didn’t even know.  And I see the continued march of new infections.  I consider those left behind: mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children.  What a different world for all of us if we could have avoided all of this.   We can’t, but we can help others avoid it.

According to CDC studies, over 90% of all new HIV patients didn’t even know that they were at risk.  Their partners were not in medical care or didn’t know that they were HIV positive.

It is time that we finally invest the time, money and energy needed to stop all infections.  This starts with each of us.  We are all humans.  And we should all be working to help all humans.