MANY NOT HIGH-RISK
Belle Glade's odd AIDS statistics initially
intrigued only a handful of health officials. But in 1985, they
became a public sensation.
On April 17, at the First International Conference
on AIDS in Atlanta, Whiteside delivered a brief lecture on Belle
Glade's peculiar health crisis.
Using a map of the city with stars marking the
homes of AIDS victims, Whiteside explained to health experts that
almost all the victims came from the same mile-square area.
He showed them pictures of Belle Glade's rat-infested
slums. And he surprised them with the news that, of 37 cases of AIDS
in Belle Glade, more than half-- 19 -- did not fit into the high-risk
categories, although 11 of those were in a category once considered
high-risk- - Haitians.
SOME PUZZLING CASES
The most puzzling case was Roy Hopkins, a 28-year-old
welder who had worked for a year on underground sewer lines in Belle
Glade and South Bay. Hopkins was white, which made him a rarity among
Belle Glade' s AIDS cases.
He also was heterosexual, had never used
intravenous drugs and had never slept with a woman diagnosed with
AIDS. He did say, however, that he had waded through raw sewage with
skinned hands while working.
Whiteside suggested at the AIDS conference that
Hopkins and the other six NIR cases might have contracted AIDS from
"environmental factors" such as a constant barrage of bites
from AIDS-carrying mosquitoes.
EARLY THEORY DISMISSED
"I told Carolyn, `No one will pay attention to
this,' " Whiteside recalled "But it happened to be big news
and it caught us completely by surprise. From that time on, I had
journalists calling me from all over the world."
By late April of 1985, the rate of AIDS in Belle
Glade-- one AIDS case for every 541 people-- was 51 times the U.S.
average, seven times the rate in San Francisco, and 12 times that of
Kinshasa, Zaire, the central African nation where the deadly disease
is thought to have originated.
Whiteside's theory would later be dismissed by AIDS
experts, many of whom were skeptical from the start. But it gave the
city an image as a place where death walked the streets.
Motorists passing through town rolled up their
windows. Nurses demanded hazardous pay to work at Glades General
Hospital in Belle Glade.
A librarian from Ohio changed her mind about taking
a job at the local library.
Belle Glade Mayor Tom Altman blamed the public
hysteria on the mosquito theory-- and the aggressive way Whiteside
and MacLeod promoted it.
"They were recruiting the press," Altman
said of the two doctors. "They were working the media hard. I
thought that was grossly inappropriate."
SOME DISMISS THEORY
Privately, health officials were dismissing
Whiteside's theory as wild speculation, Altman said, but none would
discount it publicly.
"When you deal with image and stigmas, time is
the only thing that can help you," Altman said.
In August of 1985, state health officials began
testing people living in the Glades-- Belle Glade, Pahokee, South
Bay, Clewiston and Canal Point-- for exposure to the human
immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS. They wanted to find
out if the area's high rate of AIDS was matched by a high rate of HIV
infection. It was.
Researchers tested 275 Glades area residents, all
clients at public health clinics. Twenty-two, or 8 percent, tested
positive. The rate was even higher -- 11 percent-- in Belle Glade alone.
HALF OF VICTIMS WOMEN
"That was pretty high-- a bit higher than we
had expected," said Spencer Lieb, an epidemiologist and manager
of the communicable diseases program for Florida's Department of
Health and Rehabilitative Services.
Of the Glades residents who tested positive for
exposure to HIV, more than half were women, a finding that health
officials couldn't explain.
Nationally, women made up only 7 percent of AIDS victims.
State health officials had already decided they
needed to study Belle Glade more closely. The high rate of HIV
infection among clinic patients in the Glades increased momentum for
a more expansive project-- the first scientific study of an entire
community's experience with AIDS.
That project, a nine-month, $400,000 effort that
scrutinized the sexual lifestyles, work habits and living conditions
of almost 1,000 people, began in February 1986 in a Winnebago parked
in the center of Belle Glade's ghetto.
If the setting was modest, the researchers' goals
were not.
"Any little bit of information from Belle
Glade was hot news," said Jim Cobb, the state epidemiologist who
helped direct the study. "A lot of people were looking to Belle
Glade for the answers."
