Campus ready for World AIDS Day

By the end of 2002, 28.1 million people worldwide had died from AIDS and 42 million were infected. \nIU students are among those leading the ongoing fight against the illness locally and abroad. On Dec. 1, IU's Student Global AIDS Campaign chapter will participate in World AIDS Day in order to enhance education and awareness of the disease. \n"At IU, I get the feeling from a lot of people that they do not believe that AIDS is a problem here," said Sabeen Pirani, director of SGAC recruitment. "There is still a mentality that people do not get infected here, and everyone already knows everything there is to know about HIV/AIDS."\nOn Dec. 1, 500 luminaries will be lit from Third Street to Indiana Avenue and then around Dunn Meadow to memorialize victims of AIDS. Some of these luminaries will have individual names of AIDS victims written on them.\nSGAC also has several more events planned for the first week of December. The group will be tabling the entire week in the Indiana Memorial Union with other organizations, passing out condoms and ribbons in order to educate and protect IU students, said senior Dan O'Neill, co-founder of IU's chapter of SGAC. \nAn AIDS debate is being planned, tentatively scheduled to be held on Tuesday, Dec. 2, at the Teter Nest, said sophomore Neel Bhatt, member of SGAC. \nSGAC's fund raising goal the week of Dec. 1 is to finance bringing the AIDS Quilt to IU from Jan. 28 to Jan. 30, which will be a part of IU AIDS Awareness week sponsored by the Health Clinic. The AIDS Quilt was first displayed in 1987 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to memorialize lives lost to AIDS. \nA letter-writing campaign to Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) will be intensified during the week. The campaign's goal is to pressure Lugar and other members of the Senate Appropriations Committee to increase funding for fighting AIDS abroad, and to pressure President Bush to keep his latest State of the Union pledge of $3 billion, which has been reduced to $2 billion, to fighting AIDS internationally. \nO'Neill also commented on SGAC's goal of persuading Western nations and the International Monetary Fund to drop African debts as a way of increasing the resources of African nations to fight AIDS.\n"Ten thousand people die every day to AIDS, and we are giving pennies to this cause," O'Neill said. "It really is the crisis of our generation. There's been this idea that generations to come will judge us based on how we fight this crisis."\nIU's chapter of SGAC is part of the largest AIDS action organization in the world. The SGAC was created in February 2001 by a group of Harvard graduate students who saw the need to lobby the national government for more funds to fight AIDS, O'Neill said. \nIU's chapter serves as a Midwest hub for the national Student Global AIDS Campaign. A regional conference has been held for SGAC, and IU chapter members have attended a SGAC leadership conference in Boston.\n"This organization is not just raising awareness, though, we are proactively changing things," O'Neill said. "Our mission is to raise awareness, educate and lobby through letter-writing campaigns."\nSGAC is not the only organization on campus actively working to raise awareness for the disease. The IU Health Center has worked with such groups as the Union Board, IUSA, Greek Council, residence centers and Outreach Kenya, said Anne Reese, director of Health and Wellness Awareness. IU's Health Center also offers testing services.\n"Some people feel comfortable being tested and some don't. We generally do about 500 tests a year," Reese said. "Part of our approach is informed consent …we give people options."\n-- Contact staff writer Theo Lutz at tmlutz@indiana.edu.