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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Hiv-Infected Women Make Plea For Aids Education

Emi Endo Staff writer

Camie Loveridge doesn’t want her listeners to remember just her words.

She wants them to remember how normal and healthy she looks, even though the Spokane Valley mother has full-blown AIDS.

Loveridge and Joyce Claypool, another mother with AIDS, addressed a handful of parents and school officials at Bowdish Junior High School on Monday night.

If those who attended the talk walked away with nothing else, Loveridge wanted them to see that even she, a white, college-educated woman from a small Montana town, could get AIDS.

Claypool, whose husband died of AIDS and whose daughter is infected, said, “This is a real disease that affects real people.”

“Nobody looks like they have AIDS.” Then she paused. “And everybody looks like they have AIDS, at the same time.”

An AIDS educator also shared statistics on how many Spokane area residents are living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

In the Spokane area, an estimated 2,000 to 5,000 people are HIVpositive, said Tracy Mikesell of the Spokane AIDS Network. About 220 have been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS.

The acquired immune deficiency syndrome is infecting heterosexuals at an alarming rate.

Women now account for 50 percent of new infections, Mikesell said. Many are infected from heterosexual activity with long-term partners.

The disease destroys the body’s immune system. Fluids that transmit the human immunodeficiency virus are blood, semen, vaginal fluid and, in rare cases, breast milk.

Joyce Claypool got the virus from her husband, an intravenous drug user who died in 1990.

Her daughter, Kara, 6, is the first publicly known student with AIDS in Spokane schools.

Kara, who attends Willard Elementary, was infected before or during birth.

Claypool also has two sons, ages 8 and 10. “My two boys will be orphaned by this disease.”

Education is the key to stopping the spread of the disease, she said.

“AIDS education is not synonymous with sex education,” Claypool said.

Young children can be taught to not pick up any needles or balloons, which might instead be condoms, she said. “And blood is always something that adults handle.”

Loveridge and Claypool are frustrated by the prevalent attitude that AIDS victims and anyone associated with them somehow deserved the disease.

Loveridge, who was infected through sex with her longtime boyfriend, has a 2-year-old son who does not carry the AIDS virus. She doesn’t want him to be ashamed of his mother’s disease.

“I want him to be honest,” she said. “I want him to say, `My mother died of AIDS, but she was courageous and strong.”’

“I don’t want him to pay for what happened to me,” Loveridge said.

“I may die from this disease,” she said. “But this disease will not defeat me.”