|
Date of Report:
01/2008
Source:
Southeast ATEC
During the December 2007 holiday gathering for the Southeast AETC (SEATEC) regional office in Atlanta, Georgia, staff took time to explore the earliest program files. These dusty, yellowed documents provided a tangible way to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the AETCs, remember the long reach of the HIV epidemic, and reflect on the role of AETCs as educators along the way.
|
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Surveillance Report from 1985
. CDC surveillance reports began as weekly, three-page, typed (not wordprocessed) documents. In the first report in January 1985, there were 8,057 cumulative AIDS cases in the United States, with almost two-thirds of these cases in New York and California. Today, surveillance reports are about 50 pages in length and remain valuable to trainers for current epidemiologic trends in HIV/AIDS.
|
|
|
|
Agenda for SEATEC's first training
. SEATEC's first training activity was a 90- minute workshop for hospital chaplains in Atlanta. Two SEATEC staff taught the science of AIDS and a priest taught pastoral care skills. Staff recall hearing groundbreaking phrases for the first time such as "family of choice" and "healing versus curing." Today, with the medical focus of AETC training, chaplains are not being trained in our system.
|
|
|
|
|
Understanding AIDS brochure
. This brochure was mailed in 1988 to every United States household by C. Everett Koop, MD, ScD, Surgeon General of the United States. An unprecedented health education intervention, the brochure addressed HIV transmission, risk behaviors, condoms, and even included a post-test. The take-home message was "Who you are has nothing to do with whether you are in danger of being infected with the AIDS virus. What matters is what you do." Dr. Koop's courageous brochure validated the need for AETC training.
|
|
|
|
|
Agenda for SEATEC's first conference on women
. In spring 1989, SEATEC offered a one-day conference on women in Mobile, Alabama, which was repeated a month later in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Faculty included Janet Mitchell, MD, MPH, pioneer in perinatal HIV issues at Harlem Hospital, and Helene Gayle MD, MPH, then a medical epidemiologist at the CDC AIDS Program, now president and CEO of CARE, an international poverty-fighting organization. The conference included nine speakers and 18 plane trips for this activity. The registration fee was 15 dollars. In today's atmosphere of flat funding and focus on higher-level training activities, this seems extravagant. However, at the time, it worked well and SEATEC had turnaway crowds in both cities.
|
|
|
|
|
SEATEC's first brochure
. The first descriptive brochure was published in 1989, and included the following quotation from John Snow's Mortal Fear, "AIDS is one of those things, those rare things met seldom in life, which one must either get to the heart of, dive into the middle of, or ignore completely. . .Either you have to pretend that it is not there . . . or you have to choose to address it seriously, and then only after you have let it speak to your own undefended heart."
|
|
|
As SEATEC staff mulled over their past and future, Ira Schwartz, MD, SEATEC Director, noted that it is difficult to precisely measure what SEATEC has accomplished to improve AIDS care and thereby improve the lives of infected/affected people. Nonetheless, Dr. Schwartz confirmed that SEATEC faculty and staff have addressed AIDS seriously, let it speak to their own undefended hearts, and look forward to decades to come, as stated in the first SEATEC brochure.
|
