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Everyday HIV

Diverse cast living with disease


Jane Fowler
Fowler, 69, contracted HIV from a male friend she was dating.
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(CNN) -- After her divorce, Jane Fowler did what any single person might do: She started dating. She was 48 at the time.

Seven years later, Fowler received a letter in the mail saying she was being denied insurance coverage because of a significantly abnormal blood test.

That's how she found out she was HIV positive. Now, Fowler is 69, a grandmother, and one of about a million people in the United States living with HIV or AIDS.

Although once considered a disease that primarily affected gay men, HIV has become less formulaic in recent years -- affecting people straight and gay, young and old, and of all races and ethnic groups.

That includes people, like Fowler, who were hardly part of the national dialogue on AIDS that erupted with the first U.S. outbreaks in the 1980s. HIV infection is becoming more common among elderly heterosexuals, in part because of the changing dating landscape in that age bracket.

"With the advent of medications like Viagra, Cialis and Levitra -- the ones that enhance male potency -- the people's life as far as their sexual stamina has certainly expanded into 60, 70, 80, 90 years old," says Jolene Mullins of the Broward County (Florida) Health Department.

Fowler, for one, didn't think it could happen to her.

"I had heard about this mysterious fatal ailment that was affecting the gay community, but I was heterosexual," she says. "So what did I have to be concerned about?"

She determined that she contracted the virus from a friend she was dating.

"This man was a very good friend," Fowler says. "This man was a member of my wedding party. This man married after I did and divorced before I did, so it was kind of natural for us to begin seeing each other after I divorced."

Fowler now spends time telling others how she became infected, in the hope that she can prevent others from making the same mistake.

"What I want to say to everyone, at any age: You do not know the sexual history of anybody else, only yourself," Fowler says.

HIV in a new generation

Generations apart from Jane Fowler is another group of people touched by HIV and AIDS.

Twelve-year-old Kaitlyn Klepzig was born HIV positive and was adopted when she was two days old.

She is one of the more than 10,000 children under 13 living in the United States with HIV -- an age group that has never known a world without the disease.

As Kaitlyn got older, her parents, Cleo and Casey, were faced with having to explain her mortality to her at a very young age.

"I can't imagine anyone else having to set their 3-year-old on the counter and say 'you have to take this medicine or you will die,' " Cleo Klepzig says.

Now, Kaitlyn must deal with the stigmas associated with HIV.

"The hardest thing is accepting sometimes what people think of you and how they look at you," Kaitlyn says.

In the 1980s, many viewed an HIV-positive diagnosis as a death sentence. But Kaitlyn has hope. New and improved drugs have helped her and others live with -- not die from -- the disease.

"I've never even considered not living as long as most people," Kaitlyn says. "I want to go to college and I want to succeed and I want to be a vet and make something of myself."

'I want to make a difference'

In 1982, scientists linked HIV/AIDS to blood -- and soon, to injection drug use. Although the virus is still transmitted using contaminated needles, another drug -- crystal methamphetamine, or meth -- has emerged as a dangerous second-hand vehicle for HIV.

Tommy Foster knew the dangers of drugs, but gave in to temptation and faced the consequences.

"For at least 20 years, I was Nancy Reagan's poster child for a drug-free America. 'Just say no' and the DARE program scared me silly," Foster says.

Foster says difficult times and a craving for acceptance led him to sink into a subculture of crystal meth users. He contracted HIV after having unprotected sex while high on the drug, a scenario that is becoming increasingly familiar in the gay community and beyond.

"You get a rush of almost like adrenaline immediately ... and it's like all of a sudden your eyes focus in a way that like you have never seen things before. And immediately it turns everything sexual. Everything sexual," Foster says.

Dr. Perry Halkitis, the director of New York University's Center for HIV/AIDS Educational Studies and Training, has been tracking crystal meth use in New York since 1998, and has just published the first study showing a clear link between the drug and HIV transmission.

"Men use this drug to decrease their feelings of isolation, to increase their feelings of sexual arousal, and the drug provides a catalyst for them. What we know from our studies, men who use methamphetamine tend to be hypersexual. They tend to have higher levels of anonymous partnerings -- more men that they have sex with, unsafely, than men who do not use this drug," Halkitis says.

Foster, an actor, now tells his life story on stage, relating the hard lessons he has learned through song. He says that he wants to make an example of himself, assuring that what happened to him doesn't happen to anyone else.

"I want to make a difference, and I'm not going to wait until I'm a big movie star to do it," Foster says, "because I may never be a movie star."


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