Juneau Four A’s to hold World AIDS Day vigil tonight

(Creative Commons photo by ChiLam Ly)
(Creative Commons photo by ChiLam Ly)

Juneau’s Alaskan AIDS Assistance Association, or Four A’s, is holding a candle light vigil tonight in honor of World AIDS Day.

Four A’s provides direct services to people living with HIV or AIDS. James Hoagland is the coordinator of Southeast services. He says World AIDS Day is an opportunity for people to come together and pay respect to those who’ve died to the AIDS epidemic since it began in the early 1980s.

“Most people of a certain age have been touched by this disease in one way or another. Most people I know, know somebody personally, have lost somebody personally in their family or their friends or work colleague, or just someone at some point. And that just shows how this disease has spread throughout communities and across all kinds of lines of race, class, gender, sexuality,” Hoagland says.

In Southeast, Hoagland says Four A’s has 26 clients, about half in Juneau. The roughly 300 clients statewide represent a portion of the total number of people in Alaska living with HIV or AIDS. Hoagland says World AIDS Day is a chance to honor them as well.

“It’s no longer a death sentence to get diagnosed with HIV and that means there are a lot of people living with the disease. The national statistic is 1.1 million people in the U.S. living with HIV, right? And so that number is huge and it’s only growing because fewer people are dying of the disease,” Hoagland says.

The rate of people contracting HIV has slowed, he says, but not enough to make a big difference. Hoagland says people in the prevention community realize messages put out over the past 25 years aren’t working as well as they should.

“Certainly people now know about the importance of protecting yourself when it comes to sex, but they’re not doing it enough to really slow down the rate of infection,” he says.

The World AIDS Day vigil is tonight at 6 p.m. in McPhetres Hall. The free event features talks by Dr. George Brown and Deacon Charles Rohrbacher and music by the Juneau Pride Chorus. The vigil will conclude with a ceremonial name reading of people who’ve died of HIV or AIDS in Alaska.

Sign up for The Signal

Top Alaska stories delivered to your inbox every week

Site notifications
Update notification options
Subscribe to notifications