BRAZIL Activists Take on AIDS

...Though illegal, it is common for public and private hospitals to deny treatment to AIDS patients, alleging lack of space and specialization to deal with the disease...

...The number of Brazilians with the disease suddenly skyrocketed in 1986...

...I'm different from everyone," shrugs Brenda, "I hear everyone complaining about the government, [but] I've learned that in general, the community is never satisfied with the government...

...There's no medicine for AIDS, but it can be combatted through prevention," adds a wellknown soap opera star...

...Pela VIDDA held its first public demonstration in August, picketing the downtown Rio de Janeiro offices of Varig airlines for administering AIDS tests to prospective employees without the applicants' knowledge or consent...

...three years later, it was eight to one...

...last year it was just under half...

...Mauro Schechter, who heads AIDS research at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, in 1985 the ratio of men to women with AIDS in Brazil was thirty to one...

...And in its final seconds, the government delivers the real message to those who hope the Sarney administration might do something about AIDS besides run commercials...

...When a family won't accept them because of prejudice, they come here," says Veronesa, a transvestite nurse's assistant who has worked at the house for about a year...

...Insurance companies have summarily bumped clients when it is revealed they have AIDS...

...Find out about and defend your rights...

...The group also sends speakers to Rio de Janeiro slums, schools and workplaces...

...Perhaps 500,000 Brazilians carry the HIV virus...

...It's not easy to keep this work up," admits the interior decorator-turned-activist, pointing to the tall metal shelf in his dining room which is piled with bottles of antibiotics, AIDS education materials, food and medical books...

...Now, ABIA produces frank, explicit videotapes for use with street kids and construction workers, and distributes pamphlets equipped with free condoms to sailors and dock workers...

...One objective of the Varig protest was to fight the notion that aideticos-as people with AIDS are often called in Brazil-are social deviants or outcasts on the verge of an inevitable, gruesome and somehow deserved death...

...One of Many Disasters Herbert Daniel is one of the few gay activists working on AIDS to openly, and proudly, admit his homosexuality...

...Health professionals also point out that, while serious, the AIDS epidemic is only one of many disasters resulting from Brazil's failure to invest in public health over the years...

...Activists complain that only wealthy patients can get a pure transfusion, yet nothing guarantees purity...

...Ever since I found out I had AIDS, I repeat constantly that I am alive and I'm a citizen...

...Schechter also says that around 70% of Brazilians with AIDS in 1985 held university degrees...

...Within days, she had opened her doors to several patients whose families refused to care for them...

...The tiny Brazilian Green Party, which has no chance of winning the election, nearly chose Herbert Daniel as its presidential candidate hoping he could draw attention to the minority rights issues the Greens have championed...

...The house has been a full-fledged AIDS clinic since October 1988, when the Sdo Paulo state secretary of health, in an unusual collaboration, agreed to cover most of the expenses that Brenda previously struggled to pay on her own...

...He sold it to Beijo da Rua activists talk to transvestites on Rio's Rua Augusta VOLUME XXIII, NO...

...Brenda then told reporters from a popular TV news program that she would take in any prostitute or transvestite who needed protection-including those who had AIDS...

...A Varig spokesman admitted the allegations were true, and insisted that the testing would continue...

...By most estimates, Brazil is at least five years behind the United States and Europe in terms of its response to AIDS...

...Though he urges individuals to join the fight, Cardoso points out that civil society can't clean up blood banks, import AZT and create public hospital beds unless these are also official priorities...

...I said having AIDS isn't any worse than getting gunned down in the street," Brenda recalls...

...Dealing with AIDS on a day-to-day basis has led doctors, nurses, social workers and hospital administrators to join the movement to demand a more vigorous government response to the epidemic...

...now, the figure is closer to 30...

...We aren't people dying of AIDS...

...I have no deficiency that immunizes me against my civil rights," says Daniel, who rejects the term aidctico as dehumanizing...

...They were successful, but most blood still comes from unscrupulous private banks that do not screen for malaria, Chagas' disease, syphilis, hepatitis or AIDS...

...Ranulfo Cardoso, the director of ABIA's health education program, "It doesn't matter how many hospices we open-the AIDS issue is one for the government to face...

...With AIDS, it's become clear that [this government has] no real commitment to the health of the Brazilian people," says sociologist Herbert de Souza, the founder of the country's most prominent non-govemmental organization which deals with the disease...

...Federal funds for AIDS research and lab equipment were drastically slashed last year as part of a general cut in spending on health and social services, and training programs for hospital personnel are still inadequate...

...Ministry of Health statistics show that preventable and treatable illnesses like malaria, yellow fever and dengue still run rampant...

...According to Dr...

...Worse yet, charged Pela VIDDA, when those who test positive return to see if they will be hired, they are told they have the AIDS virus-and no job...

...Alarmed at the fact that 10%-20% of AIDS cases originate from contaminated blood transfusions, ABIA activists also lobbied hard to insert a clause in the country's new constitution prohibiting the commercialization of blood and its derivatives...

...If they all worked as hard as I did, there wouldn't be any problem," she says...

...This is really a political problem and we have to fight it politically...

...Use condoms with unknown partners, from beginning to end," counsels singer Caetano Veloso in a quick, tight close-up...

...For some, taking responsibility means providing services to the sick...

...Zeca Nogueira, a founding member of Pela VIDDA who recently lost his lover to the disease, agrees...

...Many tried to dismiss it as a doenga do desviado da Zona Sul, an affliction that would only befall "queers" from the affluent and touristy southern neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro...

...It's terrible-we don't have room for all the patients...

...Three years ago, Ubiratan da Costa e Silva began to take strangers with AIDS who had nowhere else to go into his Sdo Paulo home...

...He discovered he had AIDS earlier this year, and has since joined with ABIA to found "Pela VIDDA" (For the Valorization, Integration and Dignity of People with AIDS)-the only group in Latin America which organizes people who have the disease to demand their civil rights...

...Meanwhile, financially strapped public hospitals, which treat 80%-90% of AIDS cases, bear most of the burden...

...The city's press discovered the house in 1984 after a group of thugs, probably police, went on a shooting spree that left several transvestite prostitutes dead...

...It's not a crime, it's not a sin, nor a punishment...

...But today more and more heterosexuals, women, poor people, drug users, small-town residents and children are joining the ranks of those who are ill or dying from the disease...

...two of his brothers, also hemophiliacs, died of AIDS in 1988...

...As a country, Brazil has the third highest incidence of AIDS cases worldwide...

...Only a few AIDS groups have secured funding from foreign foundations or national agencies...

...Nurses, maids and most of the 24 patients under Brenda Lee's roof usually go about their daily routine in drag...

...Nearly 40 new organizations have sprung up in response to the AIDS epidemic...

...4 (NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1989) I ABIA's Ranulfo Cardoso teaches street kids about AIDS 9Herbert Daniels of Pela VIDDA raise money for the project...

...Although official statistics place the number of people with AIDS at around 7,000, doctors, academics and activists say the figure is at least twice that high and may be doubling every ten months...

...we aren't victims of AIDS," Nogueira explains, "We're people living with AIDS...

...AIDS activists have picked up on the Green Party slogan, "All Brazil is a high-risk group," from rubber tappers to homosexuals to people attempting to live on the minimum wage...

...Until yesterday, there was a piano there...

...Transvestite Brenda Lee is the owner of a house in an Italian district of Sdo Paulo known as "The Palace of Princesses," where for years transvestites shared expenses and household tasks while they weren't out on the streets...

...Raffles, book sales, donations and Costa e Silva's own savings have underwritten most of the AIDS work he coordinates...

...Don't wait for the authorities to act...

...According to Dr...

...warns Jo Soares, a late night talkshow host, "The solution depends on us alone...

...8(ABIA...

...Members of Protestant and Catholic churches also visit and provide material aid to the sick, although the Catholic rank-and-file complain that the church hierarchy has been slow in responding to the crisis...

...Available beds fall far short of the total needed...

...Volunteer organizations like the Support Group for the Prevention of AIDS (GAPA), which has chapters in 12 Brazilian cities, run hospices, distribute food and medicine, make hospital visits and provide patients and their families with counselling services...

...President Sarney hasn't opened his mouth to say the word AIDS," complains one organizer, "It's as if he were afraid of getting contaminated...

...They believe that private initiatives are the best hope for stopping AIDS in Brazil...

...The group, "Atoba," distributes 6,000 condoms a month in plazas and gay bars, along with flyers which read "Homosexuality is not an illness...

...But most conclude it means pushing the government to act...

...The house now provides food, medicine and shelter for transvestites, homeless gays and anyone else with AIDS referred by the state health department...

...He now manages a group of 27 volunteers who make house-calls to over 80 patients throughout the city...

...Varig's Surprise "People with AIDS are the best means to disseminate correct information about AIDS," says Herbert Daniel, a writer, gay activist and ex-guerrilla leader who, like de Souza, spent most of the 1970s in exile...

...In 1985, 72% of the country's AIDS cases lived in Rio de Janeiro and Sio Paulo...

...This is apolitical issue for which all of us must take responsibility...

...In the last two years, a growing number of activists have taken such advice to heart...

...ABIA's early "safe sex" materials targeted middle-class gays, and were reminiscent of literature which circulates on the streets of New York or San Francisco...

...Several times each hour on primetime television, the Brazilian govemment's latest and flashiest AIDS advertisement punctuates the commercials between telenovelas, rock videos and news programs...

...The responsibility is ours, too...

...Private Initiative Not all activists see political struggle as an appropriate response to the AIDS crisis...

...A problem, by the way, which is common to almost all Brazilians...

...One in three people has no access to health services, and public hospitals suffer chronic shortages of funds, beds, drugs, ambulance services, lab equipment and staff...

...People with AIDS or the HIV virus are frequently fired from their jobs and are often abandoned by their families...

...As Daniel wrote earlier this year, "My problem, like thousands of other people with this disease, is not to ask for easier conditions for death but to demand a better quality of life...

...Even when an emergency AIDS patient is admitted, staff members may refuse to go anywhere near him...

...But only one gay organization, located in the poor northwest suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, is openly attempting to address AIDS from a gay perspective...

...for others, defending their civil rights...

...When AIDS first appeared here in 1983, most Brazilians with the disease were young, gay, educated, white men from the big city...

...De Souza himself is HIV-positive...

...A Rio de Janeiro-based group, Religious Support Against AIDS (ARCA), is attempting to form an ecumenical front which includes Catholic, Protestant and Brenda Lee [I.] takes AIDS patients into her Sio Paulo home REPORT ON THE AMERICAS i 10In a Sio Paulo hospice: Many people with AIDS are abandoned by their families Jewish volunteers, as well as practitioners of the Afro-Brazilian religions Candomble and Umbanda...

...it's not only up to the government," he says...

...None of the front-runners in the race for this month's presidential elections has made concrete proposals for dealing with AIDS or reforming the public health system...

...Over 2,000 Brazilians die of syphilis and gonorrhea each year, making these diseases bigger killers than AIDS...

...I'm absolutely certain that if I were a construction worker," says Herbert Daniel, "I'd already be dead...

...drugs like AZT are either unavailable or prohibitively expensive...

...The gay rights movement was tiny and fragmented before AIDS hit the country, and it is hard to tell whether the disease has helped or hurt its growth, As in the United States and Europe, in Brazil a few gay leaders have been able to win mainstream recognition and respect for their activities on behalf of people with the illness...

...According to Herbert Daniel, people with AIDS must join forces with those fighting to obtain housing, education, decent wages and human rights...

...Brenda Lee and Costa e Silva are quick to distance themselves from "leftists who blame the government for everything...

...In that year Herbert de Souza, a hemophiliac, founded the Brazilian InterDisciplinary AIDS Association REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Elizabeth Station is a writer and translator living in Rio de Janeiro...

...These people are abandoned," adds Brenda...

...Activists and doctors agree that the situation will not improve until the Sarney administration leaves office in early 1990...