Navajo Nation confronts HIV and AIDS

Reporting from Gallup, N.M.?

Five years ago, the man Elsie Smith loved told her calmly from his hospital bed that it was time for him to go. He died with a hushed goodbye and a squeeze of her hand.

Smith herself had been feeling ill for a while. Her bones ached and she vomited often. She soon mourned him from her own hospital bed.

A doctor explained to the Navajo woman that her lover had died of AIDS. It was important that they check her blood, he said. She agreed.

Two days later, the doctor told her that she had HIV. Her tired mind became flustered with questions, but she asked only one.

"What is HIV?"

Smith learned of her diagnosis at the Indian Medical Center in Gallup, where Western medicine and traditional healing converge to treat members of the Navajo Nation and where a ceremonial hogan ? or sacred structure ? sits on hospital grounds.

It is where Jerry Archuleta and Emerson Scott, partners who are both HIV-positive, go for their monthly checkup and where Danny Morris nearly died from AIDS before receiving care from both doctors and medicine men.

The hospital has become a leading force in the effort to quell a rise of HIV transmission among Navajo, a troubling development at a time when HIV infections are holding steady or declining in other groups across the country.

Most of the infections are occurring in the Navajo Nation, a vast expanse in the Four Corners region where poverty, poor education, alcohol abuse and the hardships of reservation life cultivate an environment in which the virus can spread.

Like Smith, some Navajo learn of HIV and AIDS upon diagnosis. Others believe it's a white man's disease. Doctors, meanwhile, must explain the virus and disease in round-about ways because, in traditional Navajo culture, to speak of death is to bring it about.

Larry Foster, the Navajo Nation's sexually transmitted disease coordinator, said health professionals had encountered resistance when giving presentations on the disease.

"They didn't want to listen because they thought we were bringing a curse, bringing death into their communities," Foster said. "Nobody cares until they have seen an AIDS death in their family."

In sheer numbers, the amount of infections is small among the 173,600 people who live in the Navajo Nation. The Indian Medical Center and its clinics scattered across the reservation log about 35 new cases a year. But that's about three times the number recorded a decade ago.

Signs of trouble emerged in 2001, when about half a dozen patients trickled into the Indian Medical Center with severe fevers, rashes and headaches.

They appeared to have mononucleosis, but their symptoms did not completely match that diagnosis. Dr. Jonathan Iralu, the hospital's infectious disease specialist, called for HIV tests.

HIV was rare among Navajo then. The first documented case surfaced in 1987. Typically, Iralu said, the carriers were gay or bisexual men who contracted the virus in big cities and returned home for treatment or to die.

The results of the tests Iralu ordered were alarming. The patients' viral loads, the amount of HIV in their blood, were extremely high and their bodies had not yet produced antibodies to fight the virus. This indicated they had contracted the virus within a few weeks of being tested.

Navajo were infecting Navajo.

Along with her two sons and three granddaughters, Elsie Smith lives in the tiny tribal community of Iyanbito. The name means "buffalo water," a place where herds of once-bountiful bison gathered to drink from a natural spring.

Source: http://feeds.latimes.com/~r/latimes/news/science/~3/T3Eux2yvFSk/la-na-navajo-hiv-20120105,0,413854.story

snapdragon kim jong ill dead wedding crashers next iron chef next iron chef aquamarine iraq war