Haiti Holds First 'Openly Gay March' to Mark World AIDS Day

A march yesterday was the first time demonstrators have declared their sexuality publicly in the Caribbean island nation of Haiti. Yesterday, 500 took to the streets in St. Marc wearing T-shirts saying "I am gay" ("Mwen Se Masisi") and "I am living with AIDS."

The AP reports:

"Organizers said they hoped the march will break barriers to reach more HIV-positive people and gay men with programs that have helped decrease the country's infection rate by two-thirds in the last decade. 'They suffer double the stigma and double the discrimination,' said Esther Boucicault Stanislas, a leading activist known as the first person in Haiti to publicly declare that she was HIV-positive after her husband died of AIDS in the early 1990s. About 500 participants that included health ministry officials and workers with United Nations programs followed a speaker-truck through the dusty city, chanting and carrying banners en route to the mayor's office. No officials received them. AIDS awareness marches have taken place before in Haiti, but Boucicault and organizers with New York-based AIDS service organization Housing Works called this one the first march to include an openly gay group in Haiti."

Scientists: AIDS Came to U.S. from Haiti in 1969

A genetic analysis of stored blood samples has led scientists to conclude that the AIDS Virus was carried to Haiti from Africa in 1966, and then to America in 1969, most likely by a single infected person.

University of Arizona evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey told Reuters: "That one infection would have become two, and then it doubles again and the two becomes four. So you have a period -- probably a fair number of years -- where you're dealing with probably fewer than a hundred people who are infected. And then, as with epidemic expansion, at some point the hundred becomes 200, you start getting into thousands, tens of thousands. And then quite rapidly you can be up into the hundreds of thousands of infections that were probably already there before AIDS was recognized in the early 1980s."

The scientists studied samples from five early Haitian immigrants and international data on 117 early AIDS patients to make their determination.

Reuters reports: "The researchers virtually ruled out the possibility that HIV had come directly to the United States from Africa, setting a 99.8 percent probability that Haiti was the steppingstone...Studies suggest the virus first entered the human population in about 1930 in central Africa, probably when people slaughtered infected chimpanzees for meat. AIDS has killed more than 25 million people and about 40 million others are infected with HIV."