Campus remembers AIDS victims, cause

  CATHERINE JUN Passers-by pause Friday to look at the
black shrouds that covered the statues in the Sculpture Garden for
World AIDS Day.

By Bimal Rajkomar
Daily Bruin Reporter

The only international day of coordinated action against
HIV/AIDS ““ Dec. 1 ““ marked World AIDS day, an
opportunity to commemorate those who died of the disease and to
raise awareness.

“Today is World AIDS Day. But for me, every day is AIDS
day,” said Hilell Wasserman, who spoke to students Friday in
the Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology 40 class, titled
“AIDS and other Sexually Transmitted Diseases.”

Wasserman was one of three people who spoke to Professor Roger
Bohman’s class about the social and psychological aspects of
having HIV/ or AIDS. The disease infects 36.1 million people
worldwide, according to a U.N. report issued last week.

Three million of them will die this year.

As poorer nations are hit hardest by the disease, many have
noted that Americans have slowly developed apathy toward AIDS.

“I remember 10 years ago, Bruin Walk was full of booths
for World AIDS day,” Bohman said. “Today there are just
two.”

He attributed part of the feeling about the disease to
increasingly effective treatments in the United States.

“Very clearly, as medical treatments become more and more
effective, I think people are beginning to assume, “˜Oh its
all over with, it’s conquered,’ but that’s not
true,” said Rev. Dr. Edward Hansen.

“It’s wrong to assume it’s all over; apathy
will only make this worse.”

Hansen, of the Hollywood United Methodist Church, said he cares
about the issue because his brother has AIDS and many members in
his congregation have been affected by it.

To commemorate World AIDS day, he held an inter-religious
service in the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, attended mostly
by students from the UCLA Performing Arts Committee.

The committee participated in the national Day Without Art,
which began in 1989 as a national day of action and mourning in
response to the AIDS crisis.

With approval from the Hammer Museum, they covered all the
sculptures around campus with black tarp and placed signs with
statistics about the spread of AIDS worldwide.

“We were covering the statues in Rolfe Sculpture Garden,
and a maintenance man was watering plants. He took his supervisor
aside and he was in tears, and said, “˜I have HIV, please
thank the students for doing this,'” said Rachel
Buchanan, an American Literature exchange student. “That made
our day.”

For the first time since the group started covering the
sculptures in 1993, they received permission to cover the Bruin in
Westwood Plaza.

Members of the group, dressed in black, answered questions and
gave out information to curious passers-by in conjunction with
students from Bohman’s MCD Bio 40 class and the Black Latino
AIDS Project.

Although numbers are declining in the U.S., the disease
disproportionally hits African Americans, Latinos and young people
in the country, according to the UC San Francisco HIV InSite Web
site.

Students in the class participate in many HIV/AIDS services
throughout the year as part a community service requirement, but
many were quick to note that their participation was voluntary.

Others in the class participated in Project Angel Food, a Santa
Monica -based organization which delivers meals to AIDS-infected
individuals.

Also on Bruin Walk, the Student Welfare Commission provided
information to students.

Students in the honors section of the course called attention to
the issue by organizing a concert at Westwood Plaza featuring the
band KGB.

They sold cookies and raised money for Kenyan orphanage for
children abandoned by their HIV positive mothers and rejected by
other family members.

Of the people living with AIDS today, more than 70 percent live
in sub-Saharan Africa.

“I think we are fortunate here in this country, to have,
for most people at least, the options of medical treatment,”
Hansen said.

“In other parts of the world these options for medical
treatment are not necessarily available,” he continued.

At UCLA, researchers are currently studying AIDS to find
therapies and vaccines, and see World AIDS day as a way to reach
out into the community.

The UCLA AIDS Institute is working with community health
organizations, such as the Watts Health Foundation.

“We need to be supportive of the these groups ““ they
are on the front lines,” said Faith Landsman, Administrative
Coordinator of the institute’s Vaccine Initiative.

Scientists are working on both therapeutic and preventative HIV
vaccines, and some are moving into Phase 1 trials.

Researchers said they appreciate AIDS day because it brings
publicity to new areas of research.

“A big part of it is having people see where the research
is, so when major findings or treatments come out, there is already
a ground work of education,” said Professor of Medicine Peter
Anton.

Anton does research in a brand new area and examines the role of
the gastrointestinal tract in HIV/AIDS.

They have shown that T-cells in the gastrointestinal tract, or
gut, are more vulnerable than those in blood due to their high
activated-memory T-cell count.

For the the past five years, they aimed their studies to create
a vaccine or therapy that works through the gut.

Anton noted that part of the difficulty in making a vaccine is
that it must use both the cellular and antibody response in the
body.

Despite the medical advances that have been made, he stressed
that people should realize that there is still a lot of work to be
done.

“Its important for people not to become complacent ““
things are getting worse, exponentially,” Anton said.