When public health officials announced this month that the first case of AIDS had been diagnosed in Livingston County, people in this town of 1,200 in the north-central portion of the county said, ”Here it comes,” according to Anna Mae Humbert, postal clerk.
”You think that AIDS is just somewhere else, but suddenly it`s in your little county,” Humbert said. ”It could be your neighbor. People are worried. I think they would be very scared if they thought that person actually lived in Odell.”
Piatt County, west of Champaign, has yet to see its first AIDS victim. In Mansfield (population 900), general-store owner Susan Thomas says she shudders to think what will happen when the first case is diagnosed.
”People here talk, talk, talk,” said Thomas, who moved to the community with her husband seven years ago from a Chicago suburb. ”I don`t think even a black family would survive in this town. I can`t imagine what would happen if someone with AIDS was here. I hope it never happens.”
The list of counties in Illinois reporting at least one case of acquired immune deficiency syndrome has grown to 41 out of the 102, forcing men and women in small towns across the state to contemplate an illness many assumed would occur only elsewhere.
Even now the talk has more of a ”them-and-us” quality than a realization that someone in their town could have the disease.
”We all know everybody here,” Thomas said. ”If any of the kids were using drugs, or if anybody was gay, people would know. But things are changing. Who knows what we might get moving in?”
While those still untouched by AIDS ponder how they will cope with the epidemic, the isolation of people in rural areas who already have AIDS–far from major medical facilities and often shunned by frightened neighbors–is adding to the trauma of the fatal disease.
AIDS patients in rural areas often must travel miles for treatment. Community hospitals are faced with quickly teaching nurses and other staff how to treat their first AIDS patient. Public health officials are struggling to provide home health services and visiting nurses while protecting
confidentiality.
Because gay men are one of the highest risk groups for AIDS, some gay men –already deeper underground in rural areas than in major metropolitan centers–have gone ”further into the closet, frightened of being labeled as carriers of a plague,” said a Champaign gay activist.
Others have organized openly for the first time, banding together to provide support for their stricken friends and education for gay and straight people who are at risk of contracting the disease.
And though a few parents, like Dick Builta of Farmer City in DeWitt County, say ”schools have to start now, teaching the kids how to avoid getting AIDS,” the conservatism of most Downstate farming communities makes frank discussion of the disease difficult.
”There is a lot of prejudice in rural areas against homosexuality,”
said Joan Lathrop, head of the Champaign County Community Task Force on AIDS. People with AIDS and those suspected of having the disease have met discrimination Downstate, as they have nationwide.
Harvey Grossman, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the group recently helped parents in a western Illinois town resolve a dispute with school officials who sent their kindergarten child home from school because the boy has hemophilia, a hereditary disease in which blood does not clot normally.
Because hemophilia patients often require blood transfusions, one of the ways in which AIDS has been transmitted, school officials demanded that the child be tested for AIDS. Public health officials convinced the educators that this was not necessary.
In Champaign, a judge ruled in August that a nurse had to submit to an AIDS test each time she cared for an AIDS patient as a requirement for keeping her visiting privileges with her two teenage daughters. The judge upheld the woman`s ex-husband, who has custody of the children and refused to let her see the girls unless tests proved she had not been exposed to the AIDS virus.
In Springfield, Chuck Morrill and Lee Julius, a gay couple who have formed a support group for people with AIDS, have taken two AIDS patients into their home because they had no place else to go.
”One man had been a pastor of a fundamentalist church in a tiny town in southern Illinois,” Morrill said. ”When he got AIDS, he didn`t want anyone to know. He felt there was no one at home he could tell. He stayed with us for several months. Now he is paralyzed and in a hospital.”
”Too many people think if you have AIDS you are a sleazebucket, someone out of the gutter,” said Michael Hyman, a Rantoul resident who has AIDS.
”There are a lot of rednecks here who think: `There is another faggot and he is going to die. Good.` ”
Hyman says he believes he has been spared much of the hostility that is often part of people`s reactions to people with AIDS because ”I was a bank vice president before I got ill, and I`ve dealt with folks here professionally for years. I`m gay, but that`s irrelevant. This is not a gay disease. Anyone can get it.”
Sixteen Downstate counties saw their first case of AIDS in 1986, according to Illinois Department of Public Health figures. Fifteen other counties have fewer than 10 cases each. With the number of cases doubling every year, experts predict that by next year AIDS could be in every county.
In Chicago, 561 cases have been diagnosed. In the surrounding counties, 63 have been diagnosed in suburban Cook, 14 in Du Page, 12 in Lake, 8 in Kane and 6 in Will.
Of the 740 cases reported in the state since 1981, 399 people have died. The disease, for which there is no known cure, is contracted through sex, through sharing needles to inject drugs or from contaminated blood
transfusions. Medical researchers say it cannot be caught through casual contact.
The relatively few cases outside the Chicago area makes getting attention and services difficult.
”The issues don`t change because you live down here, but the resources do,” said Ellis Rose of Champaign, a member of the Illinois AIDS
Interdisciplinary Advisory Council. ”The attention focused on Chicago because of the large numbers of cases there becomes a barrier to getting help here.” When Hyman, for example, was diagnosed in February as having AIDS, his physician believed that his only chance to live was to get into a program in which he could receive the drug AZT, which prevents the AIDS virus from reproducing. But to do that, he had to be part of an experimental program in Chicago.
”At first I had to make weekly trips to Chicago, and now it is twice a month,” Hyman said. ”It wouldn`t be wise for me to drive myself. So I have a buddy, a volunteer, who goes with me. You can`t fight this thing alone.”
AZT became available to all patients who meet certain qualifications in September, and this month a federal Food and Drug Administration panel recommended making it available to all AIDS patients with a doctor`s prescription because of its success in prolonging life.
Hyman`s ”buddy” was assigned to him through the Gay Community AIDS Project of Champaign County. The buddies, who include gay and straight people –a doctor, a nurse, a psychiatrist, a waiter and a student–provide transportation, meals, companionship and support, said Ken Bishop, director of the buddies program.
Public health departments in several rural counties have asked the Champaign gay AIDS project to help them develop AIDS education programs. ”But the gay men in those isolated areas are so invisible that sometimes even we can`t find them,” said Bob Brown, who heads the project.
Brown`s tactics include holding home coffees in which one person invites his friends to his home to discuss information about AIDS and safe sex. Each person is expected to lead another gathering for his circle of friends. The project also has put posters on buses in Champaign and placed brochures in adult bookstores and other places ”where we know university students are still engaging in risky, anonymous sex,” Brown said.
”You can`t just announce a meeting like you can in Chicago,” Brown said. ”People here have to be reached discreetly. But if we are to stop this thing–in both the straight and gay communities–they have to be reached.”
Builta, of Farmer City, said he isn`t sure whether the ”AIDS thing is as bad as they say or if people are just making it sound awful to get the kids to slow down a little on the sex stuff.”
”But we are so isolated here,” Builta said. ”All we know is what we hear on TV. ”We really need some solid information.”
In Wapella, a town of 550 north of Farmer City, John Ellis hadn`t heard that there was an AIDS case in DeWitt County. But he had talked with his fellow workers about a TV show on AIDS.
”A woman at work said she thought it was awful that they had a woman on that show that had AIDS,” Ellis said. ”She said that she thought they should put her away somewhere. I don`t know what I think. I guess if someone here got it, it would just be none of my business.”
