Rick Badie's Gwinnett: Moving from doom to hope

One day a father dropped his 17-year-old son at the door of an AIDS clinic, and drove away. He wanted nothing to do with the HIV-infected teen. His was a typical attitude in the 1980s. Back then, AIDS meant two things: Death. And fear.

“I wasn’t shocked,” said Larry M. Lehman, the executive director of AIDGwinnett, an organization that provides medical care and support services.

“In the 1980s, people were literally afraid of [HIV-infected] people.”

Lehman was AIDGwinnett’s first full-time employee. He came to the organization 15 years ago after logging time at AIDAtlanta. He says Gwinnett, and most communities, have matured as it relates to stigmas that once surrounded the virus.

Equally important, he’s seen the role of organizations like AIDGwinnett change from that of gloom and doom to hope.

“When I first got involved with this in the early 1980s, we were trying to make it very palliative for someone in the process of dying,” he said. “There was no medication. It was a very scary time and people were dying quickly.”

Nowadays, with the advent of medications, carriers can live a long time. The disease, for many, is manageable.

“The meds don’t work for everyone,” Lehman said, “but it’s important to get people in early and make sure they stay on treatment. Studies show people who are being treated are less likely to have unprotected sex, so that cuts down the spread of infections.”

Work remains, though.

Education, or lack of it, remains a factor. Latinos, for example, tend to seek care at late stages of the disease. Because of that, they tend to be sicker when they start treatment. Ditto for the Asian community.

“We’d love to see that barrier come down even more in the coming years,” Lehman said.

Last year, the Duluth-based service served 603 clients, with a 33 percent year-to-year increase in patients.

“For a program our size, that’s very high,” said Lehman, who attributed the hike to job losses that lead to loss of health insurance.

Twenty years ago, AIDGwinnett was started with a budget right at $100,000. Today’s budget tops $2 million. That money supports, among other services, a clinic that offers comprehensive HIV care for clients in Gwinnett, Rockdale and Newton counties. It pays the salaries of a 22-person staff, too.

While there’s been a 33 percent hike in patients, there’s been no similar increase in funding. Which brings me to Kaiser Permanente of Georgia.

The health care provider recently donated $1.6 million in grants to 24 “safety net” clinics and agencies in metro Atlanta that serve the uninsured and underinsured.

Two Gwinnett operations were recipients. The Hope Clinic in Lawrenceville ($50,000) and AIDGwinnett ($95,000).