Frika Chia Iskandar’s stature and personality suggest she’s more likely to be a bubbly seventeen year old than a twenty-six year old HIV-positive activist. The Indonesian woman was barely able to see over the podium at a recent conference while retelling stories about her family’s reaction to her positive status, including a story about them buying her a separate set of utensils because they feared she could infect her siblings.
“I’m the new face of AIDS. I’m young and Asian,” said Iskandar, who was born in 1981, the year the disease was first recognized in the U.S. “This isn’t something that’s only happening in Africa.”
Iskandar, who works as an advisor to the Asia Pacific Network of People Living with HIV, got me thinking seriously about Americans’ perceptions of what many consider a disease that primarily affects other continents and has little impact on our daily lives. After hearing her recent speech at the thinkBIG Conference on International Women’s Health and Human Rights at Stanford University, I started thinking about how there seems to be a sense among young women I know that HIV is a problem in India and Africa, but one that doesn’t necessarily affect our lives here in America. Are we as young women thinking about the HIV/AIDS and protecting ourselves enough?
The largest number of new HIV/AIDS cases in American women is now among those between the ages of fifteen and thirty-nine, and that group seems to approach the issue with attitudes of “it won’t happen to me” or “I already know about it, so leave me alone.” These indifferent approaches are frustrating given how easy it is to take a more active role in protecting ourselves and getting tested when finding free confidential testing locations is but a few clicks away. And one of the most influential things we can do doesn’t require money or even much activism; it’s simply starting more conversations with friends.
The lack of dialogue about infection and treatment for HIV/AIDS is sadly confirmed in talking with women my age. Not only are they having few conversations about the global pandemic, but most of the women I asked said they haven’t talked about the disease or how to prevent it in more than a year.
Pooja Bhatia, a twenty-four-year-old strategic planner, explained, “I think people our age talk about HIV/AIDS in the context of developing nations. I rarely hear someone talk about how HIV/AIDS affects them personally.”
Social justice documentary filmmaker Alley Pezanoski-Browne, twenty-four, added: “I don’t think there is a ton of dialogue about HIV and AIDS among people our age. We know it exists and we need to take precautions, and then we don’t worry about it because I think very few of us actually know anyone our age who has HIV or AIDS.”
But we do know people who we may not realize have HIV/AIDS, and certainly not everyone who’s infected knows their status. While life-saving anti-retroviral drugs mean that HIV-positive people are living longer, more than 126,000 American women are currently infected.
I’m not suggesting women scare their friends into thinking their chances of infection are much higher than they actually are, or that they spend their next paycheck on (Product) RED wares sold by Apple, Gap, or other retailers. But we owe it to ourselves to pay more attention to the havoc the disease is wreaking on women worldwide and practice methods that will decrease our own risks. When we so carefully select our sunscreen and birth control medications to protect our bodies, why are we being so passive in finding out how we can keep from becoming infected?
While 12,000 new infections annually among American women doesn’t sound very high, Iskandar left me with an unnerving consideration. “We don’t have to wait until other regions more similarly resemble those that are most devastated. Even though prevalence rates are still low here, they are still numbers. They’re still lives.”
