World AIDS Day in Palm Beach County commemorates, educates, looks ahead
It was 1981 when a board member of Belle Glade’s one hospital first heard a nurse describe the condition of a patient whose immune system had disintegrated, and who would later be recognized as the city’s first AIDS patient.
In the years that followed, nurses in the hospital saw young patients with the purple blotches of a skin cancer ordinarily seen only in the very old and pneumonia that didn’t respond to treatment. These patients were cast off by their families, with nowhere to go when they were discharged from the hospital.
It was 1988 when a Palm Beach socialite and former actress contacted her old friend Elizabeth Taylor to appear at one of the area’s first gala events to raise funds to research HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
From 2018: My friend has chosen to tell his story of living with AIDS
Also at that time, a Worth Avenue decorator was mourning close friends at nearly weekly funerals, when at an AIDS fundraising benefit she found ways to help.
All became involved in efforts to stem the tide of deaths from a virus that no one understood, and that was attached to so powerful a stigma that the president of the United States would not say its name for the first five years it spread across the nation.
On Friday, more than four decades after the HIV epidemic emerged in Palm Beach County, the 35th World AIDS Day honors the global impacts of local residents like them and urges continuing action with the theme “Let Communities Lead.”
World AIDS Day: Efforts commemorate past, work toward future
Much has changed in the years since Belle Glade hospital board member Sandra Chamblee went on to lead the Glades Health Initiative, one of three organizations in the county to get federal funding for HIV responses.
Responses organized by the hospital’s nurses to find, feed and bring what medicine they could to patients, informed models of care that spread throughout the county and the country.
The fundraiser launched by Palm Beach resident and former actress Celia Lipton Harris and her movie star friend Taylor raised $1.25 million.
Worth Avenue decorator Lydia Crozier became a founder of FoundCare, which built a community health center to provide care to uninsured and under-insured people in Palm Beach County.
A diagnosis of HIV is no longer a death sentence while medicine can prevent both transmitting and acquiring the virus.
“So many amazing strides have been made,” said Dylan Brooks, HIV prevention and education director at the Compass LGBTQ+ Community Center in Lake Worth Beach. The elimination of the virus as a persistent public health threat is possible, he said.
Still, more than 35 million people worldwide live with the virus that can lead to AIDS, and in the United States, about one-in-eight of the 1.2 million people living with the virus remain undiagnosed, and so untreated.
In Palm Beach County more than 8,000 people — 628 of every 100,000 — were living with HIV at the end of 2021, with 273 diagnosed that year, the most recent year for which data has been finalized. That is a slightly higher rate of people living with HIV than in Florida as a whole, where 625 people out of 100,000 live with the virus, and in the nation, where the rate is 384 of every 100,000.
Efforts to educate, test, and support people who have tested positive for the virus, as well as those who have not, are building protections that someday could mean the virus ceases to spread, Brooks said.
World AIDS Day: Happenings in Palm Beach County
At Compass and at FoundCare, World AIDS Day events will both commemorate the past and work towards that future.
FoundCare is holding testing and education events Friday, with walk-ins welcome at:
FoundCare, 10 a.m.-2 p.m., 2330 S. Congress Ave., Palm Springs.
Foundcare, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.,1901 S. Congress Ave., Ste. 100, Boynton Beach
Lighthouse Cafe, 10 a.m.-2 p.m., 400 SW Ave. B, Place Belle Glade
Riviera Beach Marina, 5-7 p.m., 190 E. 13th St., Riviera Beach
Compass is displaying the largest collection of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, with panels honoring those who lost their lives to the illness, starting Friday, with a candlelight vigil and guest speakers. Friday's event starts at 6 p.m. Compass is based at 201 N. Dixie Highway in Lake Worth Beach.
The nonprofit will continue displaying quilt panels through Dec. 15 at locations around the county, including:
Metropolitan Community Church of the Palm Beaches, 4857 Northlake Blvd., Palm Beach Gardens
Hatch 1121, 1221 Lucerne Ave., Lake Worth Beach
JFK Main Hospital, 5301 S. Congress Ave., Atlantis
JFK North Hospital, 2201 45th St., West Palm Beach
Palms West Hospital, 13001 Southern Blvd., Loxahatchee
Palm Beach County Main Library, 3650 Summit Blvd., West Palm Beach
Jupiter Branch Library, 705 Military trail, Jupiter
Lynn University, 3601 N. Military Trail, Boca Raton
FAU University Galleries, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: World AIDS Day in Palm Beach County brings quilt panels, HIV testing
