Augusta resident Jennifer Reyes is using her experience to encourage others to get tested for HIV.
Reyes was diagnosed with the human immunodeficiency virus July 22, 2015. She was married at the time. She contracted the debilitating disease from her husband who was unaware that he was HIV positive when they got married in 2013.
“I was in a monogamous, heterosexual relationship, and they didn’t check me during my pregnancy,” she said. “I ended up delivering my youngest child and got really sick, and for about a year or two, I never got better. I didn’t bounce back.”
Her doctor diagnosed the symptoms she suffered, but failed to test her for HIV. Reyes feels the reason doctors did not test her is because she did not fit the at-risk criteria. She did not use drugs, she was not promiscuous and she was not engaged in a homosexual relationship.
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“They told me I must have had some kind of cancer because my white cell count kept dropping,” she recollected.
“The CDC recommends that everyone between the ages of 13 and 64 get tested for HIV at least once as part of routine healthcare,” according to the agency’s website. “For those at higher risk, CDC recommends getting tested at least once a year.”
In 2003, CDC introduced the initiative Advancing HIV Prevention which called for universal testing of all pregnant women. The agency also made recommendations for reducing barriers to HIV testing.
Reyes suffers because of her late diagnosis. She is permanently disabled.
“It affects a lot of things especially when that virus is running through your body unchecked,” she said. “If I had gotten diagnosed, then I wouldn’t be in this position right now.”
The CDC states that the sooner people start treatment after diagnosis, the more they benefit from antiretroviral therapy.
“Treatment with ART reduces the amount of HIV in the blood (called viral load), reduces HIV-related illness, and helps prevent transmission to others. People with HIV who take HIV medicine as prescribed and get and keep an undetectable viral load (or stay virally suppressed) have effectively no risk of transmitting HIV to HIV-negative sex partners,” according to the agency’s website.
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Reyes said there is hesitation for people to get tested because of the stigma attached to the virus, first discovered in 1983. People assume she was an intravenous drug user. An HIV positive diagnosis is traumatic without all of the stigmatization, she said. She referred to labels as “trashy,” “dirty,” and “trash taking itself out” as insults directed toward HIV patients.
“It’s terrible the way people will act,” she said. “We need to have more patients to advocate.”
Reyes is taking her experience and encouraging others to get tested and learn more about how the virus affects patients’ bodies. She writes informative articles for various HIV-related magazines such as HIVPLUS, PanAware, and POZ.
“I recently thought about writing an article about how to understand your blood work,” she said.
Possessing a high school education, she uses only scholarly peer-reviewed articles and credible sites for references. Her work has been recognized by HIVPLUS, which sponsored her to attend several conferences. It was at one of the conferences that she met Raymond Schinazi, a researcher at Emory University School of Medicine, where he has been involved in the development of five FDA-approved HIV drugs.
“Research in the Schinazi lab focuses on developing treatments for infections caused by HIV, Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, XMRV, herpes and dengue fever viruses,” according to the university’s website.
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Reyes credits Schinazi with saving her life. He is a rock star in the world of viruses, she said.
According to the CDC, “Gay and bisexual men of all races and ethnicities remain the group most severely and disproportionately affected by the epidemic, accounting for 61% of all new HIV infections in 2009. Racially and ethnically, African Americans accounted for 44% of new HIV infections that same year.
People are dying of AIDS every single hour because they are not getting tested and because of barriers to treatment, Reyes said. Writing the articles not only educates herself but assists others in understanding the virus that alters their life.
“I almost fell through the cracks, and I am a heterosexual white woman,” she said. “Can you imagine if I was an immigrant of color?”
HIV affects approximately 1.2 million in the United States, including more than 160,000 people unaware of their status, according to the CDC website. Undiagnosed people account for nearly 40% of new cases.
Augusta reports 1,675 cases for every 100,000 people, according to the CDC.
Shellie Smitley is a staff writer for The Augusta Press. Reach her at shellie@theaugustapress.com
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