New York is the hardest hit state in the country when it comes to HIV/AIDS, said Jennifer Tiffany, director of the HIV/AIDS Education Project at Cornell's Family Life Development Center, speaking at a forum in McGraw Hall on campus, April 25.

The forum, "AIDS/HIV in the 21st Century: Facing the Global Disease," was hosted by the Cornell chapter of Americans for Informed Democracy, a nonpartisan group working to promote awareness of international issues. Alaka Basu, associate professor of sociology and director of the South Asia Program at Cornell, also spoke at the forum, which was attended by about 40 faculty and students.

Tiffany noted that New York's position as the state with the most AIDS cases is not just because of New York City. Indeed, she said, upstate New York would be sixth in the nation in cumulative AIDS cases if it were a separate state.

Nationally, nearly 1 million people have been diagnosed with AIDS since the beginning of the epidemic and between 1 million and 1.2 million Americans are currently infected with HIV, Tiffany noted. Approximately one-quarter of Americans with HIV do not know they are infected. Despite the notion that the disease is under control in the United States, 40,000 to 44,000 people become infected each year, and last year the number of new HIV infections nationally rose by about 5 percent. "We have addressed treatment to some extent, but we have never adequately addressed prevention," she said. People, she averred, don't want to talk about HIV/AIDS due to the fact that "it is a complex, stigmatizing issue because it deals with mortality, sexuality."

Addressing the worldwide problem of AIDS, Basu pointed out that "in the early '80s, it was a completely different disease" when a famous fashion designer or person from the entertainment world could talk about having HIV. Such people were the first to bring attention worldwide to the disease because, she said, they "could afford to break social taboos. Attention came much quicker than if it had remained a Third World disease."

Now the profile has shifted. "Between and within countries it tends to be the worst off that suffer from the illness," said Basu, noting that migration is one significant reason. Rural-to-urban migrants pick up the virus and spread it when they return home. She pointed to the poor in South Africa, for example, where many move to work in gold mines.

"These are primarily single men. Employers provide dormitories with eight to 10 men in a room." Outside the dormitories, a sexual market usually arises, and employers take little social responsibility.

"They can afford to not provide housing, not let families come, not educate," Basu said. "Why? Because when workers get sick there is a long line of unemployed people ready to take their place."

Graduate student Christin Munsch is a writer intern at the Cornell News Service.