Touched Early by AIDS, Americans Soldier On
Friday, June 2, 2006; 3:58 PM
-- In those days, a diagnosis was a death sentence. No one knew how you got it, this mysterious ailment that savaged the human body with almost medieval cruelty.
Baffled doctors threw everything they had at skin cancers, brain infections, intestinal parasites and other horrific symptoms. Nothing worked.
  Lonnie Payne, diagnosed with AIDS in the 1980s, stands in front of a temporary AIDS memorial in San Franciscos Castro district on Wednesday, May 24, 2006. The wall, made up of photos and notes from friends of AIDS victims, marks 25 years of the diseases impact. (AP Photo/Noah Berger) (Noah Berger - AP) 25 Years of AIDS
Twenty-five years after the first diagnosis of the first case of AIDS, the world is finally waking up to the epidemic.
• VIDEO: Caring for AIDS Orphans Save & Share |
Saving options
Twenty-five years after federal health officials first recognized the disease that would become known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, AIDS no longer is synonymous with terminal illness.
But like other wars, the early years of the AIDS epidemic produced survivors, people whose lives bear the contours of having crossed so malignant an enemy. Cameron Siemers, Lonnie Payne and Lisa Capaldini are three of them.
Three faces of AIDS, one message for a country where more than half a million people have died: 25 years is not such a long time.
___
Cameron Siemers, 24, infected during a blood transfusion as a toddler
LOS ALAMITOS, Calif. (AP) _ Cameron Siemers had a big secret until he was 18. When he decided to give it up, he did so in spectacular fashion, telling his entire high school graduating class that he had AIDS.
"It was hard because I knew all these people," Siemers said of the commencement speech. "I just wanted to give them something because we were graduating. ... And just to get it off my chest, to let them know."
The revelation explained why Cameron was small for his age and missed long stretches of school in this Los Angeles suburb. When friends wondered why he could never have sleepovers at their houses, he always had said he had hemophilia, which was true. That's how he got HIV.
His doctors think Siemers got tainted blood in a transfusion when he was 3 years old, but he wasn't diagnosed until he was 7. His mother gave him the news while they were playing Legos.
"I knew what it was and I knew what it meant, but I didn't think of it as a death sentence," he said.