Candlelight Vigil Planned to Mark 100,000th AIDS Case

In a grim reminder of a disease that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives nationwide, local AIDS groups will hold a candlelight vigil Friday evening to mark the anticipated 100,000th AIDS diagnosis in California.

“Sometime in the next week or two we will be reaching that statistically,” said Karen Jones, co-chair of the Laguna Beach HIV Advisory Committee, one of the groups organizing the vigil. “We just really want to remind people that, even with the advent of the protease inhibitors [new drugs can reduce the amount of the virus in the blood], it’s not time to relax. It’s not time to become apathetic.”

While the new drugs have raised hopes and the overall rate of new AIDS cases has declined in recent years, a county medical official agreed that the future is still uncertain for people who have tested positive for the AIDS virus.

“There’s a lot of hope now, more than there ever has been,” said Dr. Ron Taylor, program manager of HIV Programs for the Orange County Health Care Agency. “But people shouldn’t believe there’s a cure, because at the present, there is no cure.”

According to the agency’s most recent statistics, AIDS had been diagnosed in 4,587 people in Orange County as of Dec. 31. Laguna Beach has by far the highest per-capita incidence of AIDS in the county.

About 8,500 people countywide are thought to have the AIDS virus, Taylor said, although that is a rough estimate since doctors are not required to report a diagnosis if a person is HIV-positive but does not actually have AIDS.

AIDS is diagnosed only if a patient tests positive for the AIDS virus and has any one of a specific list of opportunistic infections or if his or her T-cell count drops to 200 or less, Taylor said. AIDS cases must be reported.

The vigil will begin at 6 p.m. at Main Beach, where Broadway meets Coast Highway. The public is welcome. Information regarding HIV testing, treatment and prevention will be available at the gathering.

Information: (714) 494-1446.