COMMENTARY ON AIDS : A Report From the Battlefront : Despite great strides in O.C., the fight remains difficult. Resources are critical.

As a child growing up in wartime England, I dreamed of blue sky and oranges, of peace and no more “buzz bombs.” Fifty years later, some of my dreams are a reality. I am living in Orange County where the skies are blue (often enough) and oranges grow on trees (here and there). Unfortunately, I’m still at war.

Starting as a nurse in infectious disease epidemiology, I have become a professional soldier in the fight against AIDS. The fight is personal too. Having lost a grandfather I never knew in World War I, and my father in World War II, I now am fighting to save a son in World War III, the AIDS War.

Ten years ago, I found myself among a small group who all had come to the same conclusion: AIDS had changed our lives forever, it was not going away, it would be getting a lot worse, and something had to be done to help people with AIDS in Orange County.

Together, we founded the AIDS Services Foundation. The sign on the door of our first little office simply said “ASFoundation.” When our landlord realized what the “A” stood for, he stood outside, too afraid to come in, and yelled at us to move.

After that first year, we had to move anyway. The number of people needing our help was rapidly approaching 50, and our paid staff of two and 40 volunteers was working elbow to elbow. In 1995, in a far larger main office and two satellite offices, ASF marks its 10th anniversary (“celebrates” is not the right word). Our 38 staff members and 750 volunteers is helping more than 600 people--men, women, children, white, brown, black, yellow, straight, gay, and otherwise unique. What they have in common is that they are living with the AIDS epidemic and could use some help.

Everyone at ASF knows that AIDS is deadly. We know about the devastation it can cause: the horrific diseases, the wasting, the dementia, the diapers, the nausea, the pain, and the fear. Yet given all that we know--and with time out for tears--ASF is a place of joy, life, and love. This is what our clients have given back to us, and why we say it is a privilege to serve them.

We will continue this work as long as we must and however we can. During most of 1980s, we depended almost entirely on an army of volunteers and private donations. What they were able to do made an enormous difference. Yet we still were losing the war.

Today, ASF gets about a third of its income from private philanthropy, a third from local, county and state grants, and a third through the federal Ryan White Care Act. With this mix, ASF has been able to meet the growing needs of people with AIDS in Orange County. And other agencies, like the AIDS Response Program, have been able to expand their prevention and education efforts to stop the spread of HIV.

As a result, 1995 may be the year we turn the tide in the fight against AIDS in Orange County.

Recently, the county reported a small dip in new AIDS cases. It’s too soon to tell if this is the start of a trend.

If it is, how will the fight against AIDS in Orange County change? First, it will change slowly. Any decrease in new cases of AIDS will be much more gradual than the rapid increases we saw in the 1980s. Second, thanks to better care, there will continue to be more people living with AIDS in Orange County than ever before. Unfortunately, more and more of them will have fewer and fewer resources such as private health insurance--which is why the number of ASF’s clients increased 14% in the past year.

We also will have to guard against complacency. The buzz bomb that endangers my son--and so many other sons and daughters--is a living organism with a talent for survival. It has been brilliant at undermining our immune systems as well as exploiting our human frailties: complacency, denial, prejudice, indifference, ignorance and fear. We know there are other communities where the rate of HIV infection had been dropping, only to start increasing again. For whatever reason, they failed to press their advantage against HIV. Will we be able to do better?

Part of the answer will come from Washington. The Ryan White Care Act expires soon, and it will need to be reauthorized. There’s a strong bipartisan effort to see that this happens and that the funds allocated will not be cut. But there are many other powerful people in Congress--including most of the Orange County delegation--who want to dismantle our national AIDS effort. They will have a fight on their hands. But with our county fiscal crisis, and our state’s budget problems, it is hard to hope even for the status quo.

Hope, however, is what you cannot help feeling when Orange County’s skies were as blue as they have been these past few days. Then I picked up the paper and read the obituary of another comrade in arms. He had moved away and we had lost touch. My last memory of him is as a tall, robust man, full of life and fully engaged, professionally and personally, in the fights against AIDS. Now he has fallen. I’m sure he knew that he left behind ranks and ranks of us to carry on the fight. Still, I would have liked to have seen him one last time, if only to repeat words that sustained us in England 50 years ago during another great war: “We shall not flag or fail. . . . We shall never surrender.”