"It's always been a great time to talk about HIV," Soraya Elcock, HIV/AIDS policy advocate and former vice president for policy and government affairs at Harlem United Community AIDS Center, told The Herald following the lecture she held to top off yesterday's World AIDS Day events on campus.
A small but highly interested crowd gathered in Smith-Buonanno Hall for Elcock's funny and thought-provoking talk entitled, "Activism, Women and Innovation," in which she talked about the progress of AIDS awareness and this year's AIDS Day theme, "Getting to Zero."
"We're 30 years into the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and we still don't have a cure," she said. Normally, Elcock added, Worlds AIDS Day drives her crazy because of the population's tendency to get hyped for the cause for one day, after which "it flies off of everybody's radar" almost immediately.
The difference this year's theme brings, she said, is that the science and hopefully the resources to end — if not cure — HIV/AIDS now exist.
Elcock spoke extensively about what she sees as a great barrier to the end of the epidemic — the tension between science and social activism. She said the national AIDS strategy of 2009 represented the first "coordinated, systematic, integrated response from (the) government" to the AIDS epidemic. With this strategy came the creation of the White House's Office of National AIDS Policy, which has brought together the "little pockets of money here and there" previously dedicated to AIDS funding.
The current focus of the plan will be on biomedical intervention — a combination of testing, treatment and preventative care — leaving out many of the more socially focused groups that work on counseling, education and general support.
"A lot of groups are going to be disappearing" because the redirected funding will be drying up for them, she told The Herald.
Elcock also discussed the late introduction of women's issues to the discussion of HIV/AIDS. "I find it shocking that you have a public health crisis" in which women were not considered until a decade into the epidemic, she said.
The addition of female advocates raised the question of "safe sex," she said, adding that many groups advised that if condoms were not fully effective in preventing the disease, women should abstain from sex until marriage in order to stop the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted illnesses.
The $21 million fed into this philosophy led to a second epidemic characterized by uninformed females who knew nothing about their own sexual organs. Elcock elaborated with a personal anecdote of an unsanctioned visit to an all girls' Catholic school where sexual education was banned.
Elcock said she spent the visit teaching the teenage girls how to apply a condom by mouth, a skill she said she had to acquire as part of an effort to make condom usage more "sexy."
"Don't worry, I will not be demonstrating," she added.
Among her anecdotes was a tale of being arrested three times in her activist efforts. "I really thought I was hardcore and bad until the third time, when I cried like a baby," she said.
After the talk, Elcock told The Herald she thought the small audience was sufficient due to members' high level of engagement and the specific questions they asked. The fact that a strong majority of females comprised the audience could be a result of her focus on women's issues and the origins of the politics behind the epidemic, Elcock said.
The lecture rounded off a day of AIDS-related festivities that included red-ribbon cupcakes, informative sessions on applying condoms to wooden replicas of penises and free, anonymous HIV testing for students.
