What's The Problem?

The emblematic Art Museum steps traditionally evoke a sense of empowerment.  This iconic image encapsulates the energy, grandeur, and vivacity of Philadelphia, and yet it is an illusion of passivity, a mere icon for a postcard. It is a facade that precariously overshadows the city. A visibly untroubled Philadelphia may exist, but there is another city that boils immediately below the surface. It is a world of poverty, drugs and disease. Specifically, it is the problem of AIDS.

As a suburban, Catholic school student, I willingly bought into the Philadelphia facade. In school, we learned practically nothing about HIV and AIDS. The closest we came to discussing STDs in general was the discussion of abstinence in Theology class. Accordingly, when I considered the prevalence of AIDS in Philadelphia I guessed low, extremely low. To construct my guess, I looked at the number of cumulative AIDS cases nationally and set up a proportion (according to population) to determine an estimated number for Philadelphia: 6,100. After skimming the newspaper archives, I recognized the unequal distribution of AIDS along racial and economic lines. Therefore, I added 4,000 to my initial number. However, I severely underestimated the problem. In Philadelphia County alone, there were 17,932 cumulative AIDS cases as of a 2005 survey, making up more than half of all the 31,779 cases in Pennsylvania.[1]

In my initial research, I pursued headlines and summaries from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Had I delved further at the time, I my guess would have been quite closer to the actual number of cases. Yet, it is more difficult than it seems to get an accurate portrayal of AIDS through the newspaper. Using EBSCOhost, I searched HIV/AIDS in the Philadelphia Inquirer and found 133 results from July 1998 to February 2007. Of these results, I evaluated 31 stories that had headlines suggesting HIV/AIDS issues in Philadelphia. 18 of the stories I examined dealt with AIDS on a national level, and only 13 examined AIDS in the Local section of the newspaper. 10 of the articles I searched were geared to the science and development of AIDS drugs, 9 dealt with the politics and global conflicts of the disease. Only 6 articles focused on AIDS awareness (such as AIDS Walks and Live 8: a concert raising awareness for AIDS in Africa), and only 6 articles discussed the AIDS issue specifically in Philadelphia. This analysis reveals the general treatment of AIDS in Philadelphia. I’ve gotten the sense that AIDS has been recognized as a serious problem externally, but it has been largely ignored on a city level. The tone of most of the articles I studied was a hopefully upbeat or else tragically aloof. They focused on what strides were been made medically, the advances that have been made since the AIDS crisis began, or the concentration on AIDS politically and internationally. While such focuses are no doubt important, I found them to be wholly unhelpful in constructing an accurate picture of AIDS locally. Clearly, this perception doesn’t bode well for Philadelphians on the whole. We have been entirely consumed by the facade that has been carefully laid in front of us, that we do not bother, or perhaps care, to examine the problems that are immediately behind it. The problem is not simply the enormity of this disease, but also our treatment and perception it.

Nevertheless, the real AIDS problem seeps into the media. Had I read the newspaper religiously, I would have found it. Not plastered across the front page, but rather quietly placed in the Feature sections. I would have seen in a report on an AIDS walk, that “‘In the Philadelphia metropolitan area, an estimated 30,000 people are living with AIDS.’”[2] I would have recognized that in 2002, “20,800 is the total number of cases in the nine-county Philadelphia area through June 30”.[3] Yet, even these numbers only give the briefest glimpse of the local problem. These few articles, which examine the evolution of the AIDS crisis in Philadelphia, serve only as a mere crack in the extensive facade. Undoubtedly, violence and poverty are important issues facing Philadelphia, but neglecting to consistently address the AIDS problem locally merely reflects the growing unconcern towards AIDS.