Sunday, July 27, 2008
Quick, Sports, "Hunt's Grunts"

Facing Fear

 It has finally happened, and we should all be alarmed...

By Hunt Archbold

It has finally happened, and we should all be alarmed. Late last year during a professional basketball game in Puerto Rico, two players experienced a violent collision that resulted in severe skin wounds and profuse bleeding. As a consequence, one of the players has since been alleged to have contracted human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), arising from the traumatic contact with the other, HIV-infected player. Think about that, and I’ll get back to this story shortly.

As we know, HIV can lead to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).  And as a lifelong participant in athletics, I recently felt compelled to go for the first time in a dozen years to get an AIDS test.

Last month marked 27 years since the Center for Disease Control and Prevention introduced the word to the disease that eventually became known as AIDS. It was 22 years ago last week that actor Rock Hudson gave the disease a face when he announced he was dying of AIDS. It was 20 years ago when tennis legend Arthur Ashe discovered he had contracted HIV during a blood transfusion he received during surgery nearly a decade earlier. And this November will mark 17 years since basketball great Earvin “Magic’’ Johnson announced to the world he had tested positive for HIV.

Today, AIDS is a worldwide pandemic. According to the CDC, last year an estimated 33.2 million people lived with the disease, and it killed an estimated 2.1 million, including 330,000 children. It has reached epidemic proportions in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in South Africa, which has the highest infection rates in the world. It is there that weak health systems and a lack of long-term, sustained funding threaten efforts to achieve universal access to HIV prevention, treatment and care. At the end of last year, the gap between required and available funding was estimated at $8.1 billion.

HIV is typically transmitted through unprotected sex or intravenous drug use, and is often associated with groups such as gay men, drug users and sex workers. In our country, while blacks represent only 13 percent of the of the U.S. population, they comprise almost half of the estimated 1.2 million Americans living with AIDS today. With that in mind, Johnson, whose daily powerful drug regimen has reduced the AIDS virus in his body to undetectable (but still present) levels, recently taped a series of public service announcements as part of a five-year, $60-million “I Stand With Magic’’ campaign intended to halve the rate of new infections among U.S. blacks. As noted moviemaker Spike Lee, who directed the ads featuring Johnson and his wife Cookie, said, “There’s a lot of reeducation that needs to get started.’’

We do need a reminder that while medical advances are helping people to survive the disease, the fact is that there is still no cure, and the risk of contracting it is still great when engaged in certain behaviors. While Johnson and Olympic champion diver Greg Louganis, who announced he was HIV-positive in 1995, continue to be visible and influential activists, others such as Ashe can’t, having succumbed to AIDS complications.

Men such as former two-time Washington Redskin All-Pro gay tight end Jerry Smith, who died in 1986. And baseball’s Alan Wiggins (1991), and racing's Tim Richmond (1989). And then there’s Tommy Morrison, the actor turned heavyweight boxing champ who tested HIV positive in 1996, was banned from the sport and watched his life spiral out of control, only to return to the ring 11 years later after it was determined that his test had been incorrect. As Morrison unfairly had to experience, when it comes to HIV and AIDS, fear and the unknown are sadly the norm.

You know what? That story at the beginning of this column about the Puerto Rican basketball players? I made that up. The fact is that HIV and AIDS muster feelings of fear, and it's that same fear that forced Johnson into early retirement. According to current scientific evidence, the risk of HIV transmission during sports is so small that there has never been a medically accepted incident of such. 

Fear is certainly what I felt as I waited for the nurse to return with my results. And when she said “negative,” that’s a feeling I encourage you to go and hopefully experience for yourself.

Happy times … and knowledge is power. SP