THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, June 2, 1995 TAG: 9506010184
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 35 lines
If anyone in Chesapeake was still clinging to the naive notion that worry about HIV infection is for other kinds of people in other kinds of towns, they got a shocking awakening last week.
A survey by the Virginia Department of Health showed that Chesapeake, of all places, has the highest rate of HIV infection in the state among women between the ages of 20 and 24 who gave birth last year. And the city's HIV rate among all child-bearing women is double the state's average.
Dr. Nancy M. Welch, Chesapeake's health director, called the implications of the survey results ``staggering and frightening,'' and, indeed, they are.
The notion that Chesapeake's conservative, law-abiding and relatively affluent character somehow protects it from the killing epidemic is false, cruelly false.
Most of the young women who contracted the deadly virus locally are neither homosexuals nor drug users, the two groups most closely associated with AIDS. They were infected through sex with men, often during their teenage years. Some passed the disease on to their babies, sentencing them to death before they have had a chance to live.
Education, good sense, faithful use of condoms and, above all, abstinence, are the only protections a woman has. Living a quiet, conventional life in the suburbs counts for little. by CNB