Women With AIDS to Get Housing Subsidy Funds

With an unprecedented gathering of women infected with the AIDS virus underway in Los Angeles, city and federal officials said Monday that millions of additional dollars will be spent in minority communities fighting AIDS.

Ferd Eggan, director of AIDS programs for the city of Los Angeles, said the municipal Housing Authority has just sent to the City Council a proposal to spend $8.3 million in federal housing subsidies made available this summer by the Clinton administration. After the City Council approves the allocation, the money will be disbursed.

“The money has now been allocated, mainly in the form of rental subsidies,” Eggan said during a break in the four-day 1999 National Conference on Women and HIV/AIDS being held at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

The convention has attracted more than 1,000 women infected with the AIDS virus, the largest such gathering ever, convention sponsors said. Since 1992, the number of women living with AIDS has jumped from 13.8% of all AIDS cases to 24%. The convention ends today.

Eggan’s agency was stung by criticism in a recent Times story reporting that the city was sitting on $17 million while African American and Latino communities are being hit hard by an AIDS epidemic that has created, among other problems, a shortage of housing for HIV-positive patients.

Eggan, whose agency sponsored the convention with the county’s Office of AIDS Programs and Policy, said the recent allocations “use up all the funds we were accused of hoarding.”

“Most of it is going into rental subsidies, and in fact, because of the pattern in the way the disease is spreading, that means it will be going entirely to communities of color and women.”

Wanda K. Jones, deputy assistant secretary for health in the Clinton administration, said federal officials expect a large infusion of money for AIDS programs directed at Latino and African American women. She said the administration earlier this year allocated $150 million to correct what it agrees are racial and ethnic disparities in the way money is divided up for health care and medical research dollars.

Jones, who addressed the convention Monday morning, said “the need is so great we’d like to see more money” earmarked to correct the disparities. She said she thought programs for women with the AIDS virus were in need of increased support, but that they were having difficulty overcoming a perception that HIV is a men’s disease.

“There is still a notion that it is a men’s problem--a gay men’s epidemic,” Jones said. “It’s very clear, especially when we look at the HIV data, that in many communities, particularly among young people, the cases are almost evenly distributed between men and women.”

Among those attending was Brenda Calderon, a 28-year-old immigrant from Guatemala. She got pregnant, went to a doctor for a routine test and discovered she was carrying the AIDS virus.

Calderon was standing in a group of fellow HIV patients who told similar stories. A social worker from New York state said she also learned she was HIV-positive during testing related to a pregnancy.

Cathy Elliott-Lopez said she got tested when she became suspicious about symptoms in her boyfriend, including sores, skin rashes, night sweats and fevers.

“They say women are presenting a new face in the AIDS epidemic,” said Elliott-Lopez. “We aren’t a new face. We’ve been here all along. They just haven’t seen us.”

The women in the group with Calderon and Elliott-Lopez shared this in common: None of their boyfriends or husbands warned them that they were infected.

Calderon left her husband.

“He is with someone else now and he infected her,” said Calderon, the mother of a 2 1/2-year-old daughter.