A.I.D.S. aiding a problem

Press, 13 July 1984, Page 18

A.I.D.S. aiding a problem

' NZPA-NIT New York George Cargulia was out of prison on parole, living with his aunt and grandmother in Brooklyn, when he collapsed on the street Doctors at Coney Island Hospital told him it was pneumonia at first, but three weeks later they said he had A.I.DK (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). “My family got scared, and so when I got better I couldn’t go back there,” Cargulia said. The problem of housing for A.I.D.S. patients such as Cargulia has begun to concern the organisations and individuals who help them, as social workers have had to place a growing number of people with thee illness in shelters for the homeless, single-room occupancy hotels or other public accommodation.

No-one knows how many are living in such facilities, since even the fact that they have A.I.D.S. must be hidden or they will be turned away. Low-income people with A.I.D.S. are particularly affected. Some, like Cargulia, are unable to return to their family homes when they leave the hospital because their relatives fear contagion. Others cannot make rent payments while they are in hospital, and they return to their apartments to find they have been evicted. Still others are released from prison into hospitals and nave nowhere to go when their hospital stays are over.

I “There is a very serious vacuum in housing for persons with A.I.D.S. because of all the prejudices and misconceptions connected with the disease,” said Don Morlan, housing consultant for the American Baptist Churches of Metropolitan New York. Monnie Callan, a social worker at the Montefiore Medical Centre in the north Bronx, said, “It is very difficult to find placement for A.I.D.S. patients because the resources don’t exist. Nursing homes don’t want to accept them. Hotels in general refuse them. In fact, no facility wants them.” The cause of A.I.D.S, which undermines the body’s immune system, is not known. It is known that .the groups most at risk are sexually active homosexuals and intravenous drug-users, and that the disease appears to be transmitted through sexual relations, shared drug needles, or blood transfusions, not through casual contact

Paul Kaiser, a social worker at Beth Israel Medical Centre, said hospitals discharge indigent patients to shelters only as a last resort. “But we cannot send A.I.D.S. patients to shelters, because they are rife with communicable diseases and people with A.I.D.S. have no

immunity,” Kaiser said. He said “some” people with A.I.D.S. were going to shelters for the homeless “on their own or when there is no alternative.” Roger McFarlane, executive director of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, said some smaller hospitals were discharging A.I.D.S. patients to public shelters, “which is as good as homicide.” His organisation is the most active group in New York working to help people with A.LD.S. McFarlane stressed that an A.I.D.S. patient would be much more likely to catch an infectious disease in a shelter than to spread A.I.D.S to others. Although it was generally believed that the incidence of A.I.D.S. had levelled off by the end of 1983, Federal health officials have announced a significant rise in the number of cases reported during the first quarter of this year. According to the Federal Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, the number of A.LD.S. cases reported in the United States since 1980 has reached 4690, of which 2074 of those afflicted, 44.2 per cent, have died. New York City has the highest number of reported cases, 1908, including 820 fatalities. In the five weeks ending May 17, a record 174 new cases were reported in the city, compared with 119 in the preceding five weeks. Robert Jorgen, an assistant deputy administrator of the city’s Human Resources Administration, said the city recognised the need for a non-profit building for A.I.D.S. patients. If the city had a 200-room hotel for A.I.D.S. patients, he said, “We could fill it up.” Diego Lopez, a leader of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, has surveyed the housing needs of A.IJD.S. patients and is meeting with social workers to see how they can be met.

“We know what is needed, a facility with support services for the terminally ill,” Lopez said. Even those A.I.D.S. victims who have somewhere to live need a place with more support, because of the care and treatment required.

P. W. Kardiasmenos, for example, lives in a halfabandoned tenement on the Lower East Side. His neighbours posted on his door a scrawled sign that said, “Keep out, very infectious disease, quarantine in this apt.” Kardiasmenos is so weak that he cannot get out of bed without help. He depends on friends to bring him food every day, and on a visiting nurse to give him a sponge bath three times a week. A volunteer from Gay Men’s Health Crisis pays the gas, electricity, and telephone bills and does all the paperwork for public assistance.