The Student Welfare Commission will be hosting its ninth annual
Roll-AIDS event today with roller skating in the Ackerman Grand
Ballroom to promote safer sex and AIDS awareness.
Planned by the AIDS awareness committee of the Student Welfare
Commission, students are invited to attend Roll-AIDS between the
hours of 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. tonight. Admission to Roll-AIDS is
free, and students can either bring their own roller skates and
roller blades or rent them for $6, of which $1 will go to an
African orphanage to help in the struggle against the AIDS
epidemic.
A guest speaker, Wendy Arnold of the South Los Angeles Peer
Education Program, will attend Roll-AIDS and talk about AIDS
prevention and awareness. There will also be an art display
focusing on AIDS as part of the effort to promote AIDS awareness,
said Nancy Lee, assistant director of the event.
“We want to put the word out there that AIDS is still a
huge problem in the U.S. and in India, China, Africa “¦”
Lee said. “People are still dying from it, still contracting
it.”
HIV, which stands for Human Immunodeficiency Virus, is
transmitted through activities involving four bodily fluids ““
semen, breast milk, blood and vaginal fluid.
“Unprotected sex is probably the main one,” Lee
said. “You can get it if you use drugs through unclean
needles. “¦ Babies can get it from their parents.”
Tears and saliva have never been documented as modes of
transmission of HIV, but it is possible to acquire the virus
through oral sex through open sores or bleeding gums, according to
AIDS.org.
The main purpose of the Roll-AIDS event, Lee said, is to provide
information about HIV/AIDS in a time when many people are
forgetting that the epidemic is still a vital world issue.
“There have been so many advancements in terms of vaccines
and trying to control it that the importance of the word getting
out there has been diminishing lately,” Lee said. “But
it’s still a really big problem.”
HIV damages a person’s immune system and causes AIDS when
a person suffers from an opportunistic infection due to a weakened
immune response or has a T-Helper cell count of below 200 cells per
milliliter of blood. A healthy immune system has a T-Helper cell
count of between 500 and 1500 cells per milliliter.
Last year, 42 million people were living with HIV/AIDS, and 5
million people were newly infected with the disease, according to
UNAIDS and the World Health Organization. In 2002, 3.1 million
people died of AIDS, including 610,000 children under the age of
15.
Sub-Saharan Africa suffered immensely from the HIV/AIDS
epidemic, with 8.8 percent of its adult population living with
HIV/AIDS in 2002, according to UNAIDS and the WHO. Last year
980,000 people were living with HIV/AIDS in the United States and
Canada.
In his State of the Union address, President Bush pledged $15
billion over the next five years to the fight against HIV/AIDS.
However, with fewer than 10 percent of people with HIV/AIDS having
access to care or treatment for the opportunistic infections AIDS
can lead to, according to UNAIDS and the World Health Organization,
even this may not be enough.