At O.C. HIV Clinic, Quiet Is Heartening

When you run a public health clinic, you like the quiet mornings. It’d be even nicer if you came in for work some week and no one showed up at all, if no one was sick and needed help with the disease they’ve got.

That’s not how the real world works, however. Every day, someone needs you.

The next best thing, then, is a quiet morning and that’s how it was Tuesday at Orange County’s HIV clinic on West 17th Street in Santa Ana. A half-dozen people were waiting to see the staff, reflective of the 17,000 who came in last year to find out if they had HIV. Only about 1% did. The good news for those otherwise luckless people is that the staff is confident it can give anyone who has HIV the kind of treatment and counseling he or she needs.

What a world apart that is from the headlines coming out of the AIDS Conference in Africa this week. The AIDS epidemic continues almost unchecked there and the headline on this Tuesday morning is that the disease may cut life expectancy in some African countries to under 30.

Almost unfathomable.

“These are encouraging times,” Penny Weismuller says in response to my question about the local fight against HIV. “But it’s sobering all over again when you see the impact that HIV is having on Africa and other parts of the world where there isn’t the access to [a range of treatment services].”

Weismuller is the county’s division manager for disease control and coordinator of its AIDS program from 1987-91. One of the people she’s hired is clinic director Mitch Cherness.

Cherness remembers a time not long ago when if you survived 10 years with the AIDS virus, it was a miracle. Now, he eschews the term “AIDS,” because he thinks it suggests a death sentence. He refers to anyone afflicted with the virus as having HIV.

‘Good Times . . . Cautious Times’

Through 1999, slightly more than 3,000 Orange County residents died of AIDS in the last 20 years, Weismuller says. She estimates that as many as 6,700 current residents may be HIV-positive, with 2,400 of them known to have AIDS.

“These are good times and cautious times,” Cherness says. The anti-HIV drugs have proved successful, he says, and California has made it possible for virtually anyone to receive the necessary treatments. In addition, people are more aware of HIV and are coming in for treatment before the disease overwhelms them.

Amid that good news lies danger, Cherness says. “People have the sense they can take [treatments] and they’ll be OK. The truth is that HIV is still being transmitted.”

The tragedy of the Africa situation is that so much progress has been made fighting HIV here in the United States.

For example, one drug significantly lessens the chance that an HIV-positive pregnant woman will pass the virus to her unborn child. That is the kind of treatment not widely available in Africa but which, if it were, would make a major difference.

The scale of the unfolding disaster in Africa dwarfs the worst AIDS period in the United States, and Weismuller remembers how despairing those days of a decade or more ago were.

“In the early days, the [local] plan was how do we get hospital care and how many hospital beds do we need,” she recalls. “In some of my early planning documents, we’d take a random day and see how many were hospitalized and project how many beds we’d need.”

If only for that reason, she and Cherness understand what Africans must be going through.

“The numbers in Africa are staggering,” Cherness says. “You pay attention to them and your heart goes out to them but you think, ‘Thank God I’m not there. Thank God we’re in a state and country that has allowed people to have the care that they need.’ ”

EMBARRASSING: In Sunday’s column, I misidentified the new foreman of the county grand jury. He’s Joseph Gatlin, not Harry Gatlin as I insisted on calling him. I’ll spare you my alibi, because as my old high school football coach would say after a fumble, “I don’t want to hear excuses.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.