By DAWN ZERA

Times Leader Correspondent

Jill Arthur, outreach and secondary prevention specialist for the Wyoming Valley AIDS Council, remembers visiting senior centers in the valley to speak about HIV and AIDS and seeing some people rolling their eyes. But it may be time for everyone to sit up and pay attention as nationally more people over the age of 49 are getting infected with HIV and the number of AIDS cases in Luzerne County continues to increase.

HIV, human immunodeficiency virus, is a disease that can destroy a person’s immune system. HIV progresses to AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, which is the end stage of the disease. People with AIDS become susceptible to infections and rare cancers that can kill them.

Luzerne County in 1998 reported 67 males and 11 females living with AIDS. In 2003, the most recent statistics available, a reported 84 males and 15 females in the county were living with AIDS. It is estimated that about 40,000 people annually in the United States are newly infected and about one-fourth of those who are HIV-positive do not know it.

With June 27 designated as National HIV Testing Day, Arthur said the date is a good reminder that HIV testing and counseling are key to the prevention and treatment of HIV and AIDS.

“It is very important to know your status. Early detection is very important to begin the process of managing the disease. It also is important to protect any partner who might get infected. A lot of new cases are because people don’t know their status, and they can go on for years with undetected symptoms,” Arthur said. “Ignorance and denial does fuel the epidemic.”

Being diagnosed with HIV is not the death sentence it was 20 years ago, when health-care providers were struggling to figure out how to deal with the disease. A regimen of healthy diet, exercise and combinations of drugs can help those who are HIV positive live normal life spans. Magic Johnson, for example, a former professional basketball player who was diagnosed with HIV in 1991, is still alive.

But Arthur said examples such as Johnson are “double-edged swords” in that they give the public the false impression that being HIV positive is not a big deal.

“It is a big deal still. People can get infected with a resistant strain or may have trouble finding a drug cocktail that works with that resistant strain,” Arthur said.

Scranton resident Michele Simmons, 45, is a case in point. Diagnosed as HIV-positive while trying to give blood to the American Red Cross in the late 1980s, she was in denial for several years as to the seriousness of the disease. She got cocky and stopped taking medications doctors had prescribed to help her manage the disease. She ended up getting ill and near death. Now she knows better.

She got infected from a sexual partner who did not realize he was HIV-positive himself. She hopes her story can be a warning to others that ignorance is not bliss.

“If you don’t know about it, you figure it won’t affect you, but that’s not true,” Simmons said. “There are a lot of people out there walking around who don’t care and are not acknowledging it and are passing it off to a whole lot of people. If you don’t acknowledge it, it’s going to keep spreading. That is what keeps it an epidemic. Ignorance is the death sentence.”