Eighteen years have passed since, Armando Ramírez, a Mexican living in Chicago, learned that he had Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (HIV) , since he learned to control , understand and take care of the disease to achieve a good quality of life. Now, there is another issue that worries him and for which he does not take his finger off the line in his activism against the community.
“The epidemic continues and the new generations are not aware” , he warns in an interview with this newspaper in which he emphasizes. “There are more Hispanics infected every day.”
This Guanajuato who is part of the team of activists of CALOR , a non-governmental organization with a operations in Chicago , one of the cities with the highest number of Mexican migrants in the United States, than since the explosion of the pandemic in the mid-eighties of the century In the past, it focused on helping those who contracted the disease.
Little by little the medications helped control it and with the passage of time it stopped being fatal, which has relaxed the use of condoms, the main ally to avoid contagion by sexual transmission and, therefore, the disease is still there, they no longer die in the same proportion, but the number of infections remains.
“We continue in pandemic ”, warns Omar López, executive director of CALOR. “The saddest thing is that while among the white population the number of infected has decreased and in the Afro-American population, which is the most affected with a 30%, remains the same as a few years ago, among Hispanics, the figure has grown and now represents the 20 % of the sick. ”
CALOR is part of the AIDs Healthcare Foundation (AHF) that provides help to infected people with low income get free medicines and tests throughout the American Union.
Causes
Armando Ramírez was married for 12 years to 2019. After the separation, when he felt emotionally stable to seek another relationship, he found two very novel situations regarding how new love affairs were known in the last decade.
Even before his marriage , the most common thing for someone looking for a partner was to go to a bar, tempt luck a little and, if it favored her, she could meet someone to have a sexual encounter that may or may not transcend; On the other hand, by the second decade of the 21st century these possibilities multiplied.
“Now in any application you can find someone who is close and wants the same thing as you,” he acknowledges. “You can schedule appointments, everything is simpler and that has increased the risks,” he warns.
Although Armando Ramírez is gay – the sexual group most affected by HIV – he knows that the same It happens in the case of heterosexuals and that when everyone mixes, relationships end in a very dangerous lust
“There are married men, for example, who also seek homosexual encounters and it is known why They say it: we better see each other on Monday because on the weekend I will be with my wife or things like that. ”
Another issue is the excess of confidence derived from advances in science to cope with the disease . When Armando Ramírez started taking them in the 2003 it was torture to take a trip because he had to fly with refrigerated retrovirals and ask the flight attendants to keep them for him from what the whole crew knew.
Now it is not necessary to keep them cold. He takes only one pill a day and has no side effects for him, although there may be for others because the reaction to the drug depends on each body. There may be unstoppable diarrhea, vertigo, dizziness or some other symptoms, but not as violently as in the past.
The ideal of the doctors is that the patient reaches such a level of control that no longer it is detected or contagious, even if it is a carrier. Armando Ramírez is at that level. Even so, he says that when he has a chance encounter, he tells them about his condition and is surprised at the reaction of his interlocutors, especially young people. “They don’t care, they have trusted themselves.”
Omar López agrees on this. “We believe that there is a relationship between the use of prevention treatments for someone who is at risk and takes it to avoid getting infected (a simile of contraceptives, but for HIV) but they are more exposed because before the safest thing was to use condoms”.
Education
In recent weeks, Chicago opened 100% to its activities after the pandemic and what is coming soon, just for the gay community are dozens of festivals for the summer, when people take off their shirts, there is music, they drink alcohol, do drugs and there is a lot of sex. People come from California , from New York, including many Hispanics.
” We can think that there will be a rebound in cases of HIV infections and they will take them to other places as has happened before and not only in the United States but also in Mexico, where many have families. ”
According to recent data from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Censida and AHF in Mexico the 90% of women in this country who contract HIV are infected by their partner , some of them were migrants in the United States who visited them.
Omar López considers that in the last Times are not so many cases with this profile due to the complications that undocumented immigrants currently have to come and go. However, USA. it has a greater number of cases proportional to the population with around 1.2 million ; Mexico has little more than 330, 000 according to official figures.
In any case, the current bet of HEAT is the tests. Go to festivals, the subway, the streets, the consulates of Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador or any meeting of Hispanics where they can apply it in a massive way since a picket is enough to draw a little blood and the result comes out. in five minutes.
For every thousand tests that apply, one or two positive cases appear and thus prevent the disease from continuing to spread.
Armando Ramírez believes that it is important to make people understand that, although the disease is controlled, it is not the same. “Now you can become a father and not transmit the disease to your child, but the treatment is very expensive,” he warns as an example among many other disadvantages. At the end of the day, there is nothing better than being healthy
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