HIGHEST SINCE 1996 Polk Reports 108 New AIDS Cases in 2003The number of county residents diagnosed since the 1980s reaches the 1,500 mark.robin.adams@theledger.com LAKELAND -- The number of new AIDS cases in Polk County increased for a second year in a row in 2003, with more cases reported than in each of the previous six years. One-hundred and eight Polk residents were reported with AIDS, which was 16 more than the 92 in 2002. It was the highest yearly total since the 115 new cases in 1996. The county also hit an unwelcome milestone as 2003 ended: A total of 1,500 Polk residents had been diagnosed as having AIDS since the disease began being tracked in the 1980s. "I'm really concerned," said Cathy Robinson Pickett, a Lakeland woman with AIDS who is one of the leaders of Friends-Together, a nonprofit AIDS education and mentoring program. "For a lot of us who have been infected a long time, the medicines have stopped working." In 2003, she said, a large number of people who were infected and active in the cause became ill or died. Polk County has the 10th largest total statewide, although its 1,500 are less than one-third the number in either Hillsborough or Orange counties. These numbers don't include jail inmates, who are listed under the Department of Corrections. Dr. Daniel Haight, director of the Polk County Health Department, said much of last year's increase in reported AIDS cases is because of better communication between the Health Department and doctors' offices. Gloria Barnes, who monitors AIDS statistics for the department, "did an extra effort to work extremely closely with private doctors' records rooms," Haight said. Statewide, the number of new cases decreased slightly, with 4,851 cases diagnosed in 2003, compared with 5,052 the previous year. Florida had a cumulative total of 95,141 people with AIDS. In people diagnosed with HIV, which precedes AIDS, Polk County had a slight decrease. There were 77 new cases diagnosed, two fewer than the 79 in 2002. There have been 612 total. Florida had 6,654 HIV cases diagnosed in 2003, down from the 7,070 in 2002, and 43,003 total. HIV numbers include some people who develop AIDS during the reporting period. Haight said Polk County is seeing an increase in the number of Hispanics with AIDS or HIV, as well as "a lot of heterosexuals with it." What the numbers don't show, Lakeland resident Glen Gary said, are the changing nature of problems faced by people who have AIDS and continuing complacency among people who don't think they're at risk. "We're lulling the population into a false sense of security," he said. Gary, diagnosed with HIV in 1985, moved into AIDS by the early 1990s. From a series of AIDS drugs that lost effectiveness, he progressed to the multi-drug combinations credited with preventing or delaying HIV from converting into AIDS and with prolonging the lives of people with AIDS. "With the advent of the new drugs, I truly was saved," he said. As AIDS began to be seen as a disease capable of being controlled, he and others say, people saw less reason to avoid behaviors that increase their risk of becoming infected. Those include injecting drugs and having unprotected sex with people whose infection status they don't know. And the medical community became less accustomed to its complications, such as a specific type of pneumonia, Gary said. Health-care workers often are unaware that people whose immune systems have been boosted by the new drugs still can have some of those types of infections despite seemingly healthy blood measurements, he said. "So many infectious-disease doctors have gotten burned out that there are very few left," Gary said. Another problem, he said, is the ongoing difficulty AIDS outreach programs face in getting their message to heterosexuals and to residents of mainstream black communities. Of the 1,500 reported with AIDS in Polk County through 2003, 42 percent are white and 52 percent are black. Six percent are Hispanic of all races. State statistics are similar, although with a larger percentage of Hispanics. Thirty-seven percent of Florida residents with reported AIDS are white. Forty-seven percent are black. Sixteen percent of the overall 95,141 are Hispanic. One out of 46 blacks in Florida is HIV-infected, a rate that rivals some Third World countries, Pickett said. "We're so complacent," she said. "We're not talking about it." |