AIDS in The Buffalo News
Despite my naiveté regarding AIDS, I found many articles in The Buffalo News addressing the severity of the disease. Many editorials defended the indispensability of AIDS funding. An editorial on November 22, 2006 derided the effect of Ryan White HIV/AIDS legislation on upstate New York, stating that the act would cause funding for New York to “drop more than $8 million each year in the first three fiscal years”. While New York “remains the epicenter” of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, cuts in funding would prove detrimental to the AIDS services in Buffalo, which include Erie County Medical Center, AIDS Community Services, the American Red Cross, Group Ministries, an Horizon Human Services. Reading this article was the first time that I heard of any AIDS services in my county, let along the deleterious impact of a “four year loss of more than $51 million” in AIDS funding for upstate New York. I discovered an additional article that described in detail an AIDS service in Buffalo, mentioned in the above editorial, Group Ministries, which I had no idea even existed, due to my alienated connection with the poorer sections of the inner city. The service group, a “faith-based human services organization that has operated on the East Side for 15 years”, recently expanded to West Buffalo, where it will conduct outreach work, “particularly in HIV and AIDS testing and prevention” in neighborhoods “with a large population of Hispanic and Latino residents. AIDS services for Hispanics represent an essential project, as the cumulative rate for Hispanics in Erie County is 357, much larger than the rate for the state of New York, 217, as seen in Table 3.
Additional editorials on November 20, 2006 and February 10, 2007, illustrated the somber state of AIDS. A resident of Cheektowaga in Buffalo reported on AIDS in Swaziland, which “in 2004 had the highest HIV rate in the world, at 42 %”. Firmly declaring that AIDS is “happening all the time, and it needs to stop”, the editorial focused on the lack of acknowledgment that AIDS receives among Swazis, despite the fact that “there are funerals every weekend”; however residents report that “those people died of stomach aches or diarrhea”. AIDS symbolizes something “destructive and invisible”, which possessed the power to “kill so easily”. Similarly, another editorial accentuated the “terrifying” statistics of AIDS among blacks. After a previous article written in 1999, the editorialist urges others to head the same warning he supplied previously: “black America needs to quit pretending homosexuality does not exist, intravenous drug use does not exist”. As the “main reason for this plague is silence”, numerous social and religious factors contribute to the “silence” of the severity of AIDS, including “closed-mouth social conservatism” and “priggish moral rectitude of a people still ill at ease discussing homosexuality, drug use, and other realities”. This editorialist addresses and attacks the denial of the Catholic Church, which imbibes its educational system with an idealistic focus on abstinence rather than the harsh reality of the importance of protected sex. According to the author, “we mouth piety, prayers, and platitudes while the world burns down around us”. Although many articles in The Buffalo News warn of the dangers of AIDS, in my defense, my low estimation can partially be defended by the fact that while many people express opinions of marshalling awareness for AIDS, little funding and announcement of AIDS events presents itself within the newspaper. Announcement of HIV/AIDS Awareness Day was contained within a news brief containing only three sentences. The claim that “National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day will be recognized in the city this year” implies a lack of recognition in previous years. Also, despite the titular name of the Awareness Day, the severity of AIDS was partially dismissed by listing the disease as merely one of many epidemics that plagues society, as perceived on the statement, “in addition to AIDS education and testing, people can learn more about other health issues such as cancer and high-blood pressure” (10). Also, AIDS services receive little funding within Western New York; AIDS Family Services received the lowest grant, a mere $15,000 dollars, intended “for a nutrition program for persons living with HIV or AIDS”, in the series of grants awarded by The Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo (11). While the foundation presented the greatest amount of money, $200,000, to an effort to improve literacy rate, the organization granted only 1/13 of the largest amount to AIDS Family Services. This lack of funding manifests both folly and irony; while Buffalo possesses a cumulative AIDS rate almost twice that of the national average, the city seems more inclined to focus on literacy rates rather than a fatal disease.HIV Legislation in Western New York
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