WATCH: AIDS Resource Center hosts candlelight remembrance – Hot Springs Sentinel
Since 1988, Dec. 1 has been known as World AIDS Day with the purpose of bringing awareness to the disease and remembering those who have died from it.
On Thursday, the Hot Springs AIDS Resource Center, also known as the Tuggle & Shelby Clinic, hosted a candlelight remembrance in front of Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts, the site of the old St. Joseph’s Hospital where the original meeting about bringing an AIDS resource center to the area took place.
“With everyone that is living today, it’s a reminder that HIV is still here, but you’re gonna live a normal life expectancy,” Mike Melancon, the founder and director of the center, said.
“The science and technology behind the medication that is now available to everyone, everyone that comes to our doors, it’s available to provide the medication to them as you would receive at any large metropolitan city. We’re here in Hot Springs, a small city, but we have the same drugs that are offered to the folks in New York or Los Angeles, Chicago or New Orleans.”
This year’s event was the sixth time the Hot Springs AIDS Resource Center has hosted a candlelight remembrance on World AIDS Day. The center hosts the event every year to bring awareness and education about the disease to the community.
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“The stigma and stereotype that’s involved with HIV is still there today, just like it was 30 years ago when we started this,” Melancon said. “I don’t see the stigma going away. Society looks different in some areas when you’re talking about diseases, but HIV is a disease. That’s how it’s labeled. It’s no different than any of the other diseases out there: hypertension, glaucoma, diabetes. It’s just a disease.”
As the only nonprofit clinic for those infected with HIV in the county, more than 350 infected people are documented with the Hot Springs AIDS Resource Center, Melancon previously said in a letter to the editor submitted to the newspaper.
“We had a new (patient) come in this morning that we did the intake with that’s a new diagnosis,” Melancon said. “And he will live a normal life expectancy. We have to educate better because this was somebody that went through a public school system right here in Hot Springs that actually sat in a class that we did a few years ago, and he told us he remembered us coming in and talking to him and he didn’t think it would happen to him.
“It can happen. HIV does not discriminate.”
The youngest person the clinic has ever had to test positive was 14 years old, he said.
“HIV was once known as a ‘gay disease.’ It’s not the ‘gay disease’ that it once was known. We have more heterosexuals infected than homosexuals, and that tells me it hits every corner of society, you know, with statistics out there. That’s why the education is so important and we’re got to educate and do a better job.”
Melancon also mentioned the importance of taking protective actions, as HIV is not a curable disease, but only a manageable one.
“Sexual contact is the number one mode of transmission right here in Hot Springs as well as across the nation,” he said. “So, if we could put a stop to the risky behaviors and educate, I think our number will decline.”