East County Clinic Urged for HIV/AIDS Cases

By MARY F. POLS

Dec. 14, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

With updated figures showing the rate of AIDS cases in eastern Ventura County higher than expected, county health officials are calling for the establishment of a special clinic to serve HIV/AIDS patients in Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley and Moorpark.

The majority of the 78 new acquired immune deficiency syndrome cases reported in Ventura County in 1995--the most recent year for which data are available--were in Ventura and Oxnard.

But mapping by ZIP Code for the first time “revealed that no community or city in Ventura County has escaped this epidemic,” according to a report released Friday by the county’s HIV/AIDS Advisory Committee.

During 1995, Simi Valley--which showed one of the greatest increases in AIDS cases--reported 13 new cases while Thousand Oaks had eight and Moorpark recorded two.

“This disease isn’t just occurring in the western end of the county,” said Paul Lorenz, public health administrator.

“This is our way of making sure that people understand that this is a countywide issue.”

The report will be presented to the Board of Supervisors at its meeting Tuesday, though Lorenz said health officials will return after the holidays with more specific recommendations regarding the east county clinic.

Health officials are considering three possible locations for the new HIV/AIDS clinic, including adding to already established public health clinics in Simi Valley or Thousand Oaks.

The clinic would offer outpatient services such as blood testing and regular checkups, sparing sick east county residents from having to make the long trip into Ventura, where most of the county’s AIDS services are located.

Martina Melero, a public health nurse who chairs the AIDS task force, said the group started to get a better sense of the number of east county AIDS patients after a case manager began to work out of an office in Simi Valley nearly two years ago.

“We were sort of surprised actually,” Melero said. “Our caseworker started out there and her caseload shot up so quickly. We had not realized the number of patients until we started to see people out there.”

Western Ventura County already has a good network in place to care for AIDS patients, she said, including a specialty clinic at the county’s public hospital. Duplicating that system in the east county will not be easy, she said.

“To try and duplicate that is going to require more staff, more money, more time,” Melero said. “It’s going to be difficult, but if we have support for it, we can do it. That is what we hope this report does.”

Saying she was “disheartened” to hear of the increase in AIDS patients, Supervisor Judy Mikels, whose district includes Simi Valley, said she would support an east county clinic.

“If at all possible, we need to find a way to help these patients,” she said. “If it [the clinic] can’t be as large or as full service as we’d like, at least we need to do something.”

The report, however, did offer some encouraging news for local health officials. After jumping 57% in 1994, the number of new AIDS cases in women and Latinos decreased slightly during 1995. And incidents of HIV in newborns remained extremely low, with only one baby testing positive for the virus out of 2,946 county births surveyed by the state in a three-month period in 1994.

More than 2,500 people visited county testing facilities during 1995 to take anonymous tests for the HIV antibody. Only 0.6% of them proved positive, down from 0.9% in 1993 tests.

The largest affected group of Ventura County residents are men between the ages of 30 and 34. The most common method of transmission for men is sex with other men. But the report notes an increase in the percentage of heterosexual contact exposure for men. Between 1990 and 1993, about 2.5% of all male AIDS cases in the county came from heterosexual sex. Between 1994 and 1995, that number climbed to 8.5%.

Faced with these statistics, health-care officials say they still have a long way to go to stop the spread of AIDS in Ventura County.

“There is still a lot of work to be done,” Melero said. “What is so sad is AIDS is preventable. A lot of diseases aren’t but this one is almost 100% preventable.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Local AIDS Cases

The number of AIDS cases reported in Ventura County cities in 1995.

Camarillo: 5 cases

Fillmore: 0 cases

Moorpark: 2 cases

Ojai: 1 case

Oxnard: 24 cases

Port Hueneme: 2 cases

Santa Paula: 2 cases

Simi Valley: 13 cases

Thousand Oaks: 8 cases