BANGKOK: By any measure, Mark Milano should be a dead man. Yet 23 years after contracting HIV, the activist has defied the odds to stay one step ahead of the virus that has killed nearly all of its early victims and is ravaging the developing world.
Milano has experienced what few people on earth have - living through the entire timeline of the modern era's biggest health crisis while being part of it. Cheating death has become a vocation for the American, but he also vows he will use his days to shame governments for their pitiful record in fighting the disease.
"I've never had the time to fear this," Milano, now in his late 40s, said at the 15th International AIDS Conference in Bangkok which ended on Friday. He told of the relief when he finally learned what he was faced with after bouts of painful illness in 1981.
"I was diagnosed so early that no doctors could tell me what it was, but I was actually happy when I got the news." It took months before he was identified as having the virus which causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. Except that AIDS has yet to strike Milano.
He has never been prescribed the antiretroviral (ARV) treatments the United Nations says are urgently needed by six million people. "In the beginning doctors couldn't do anything, so I had to learn to take care of myself. And I think that's actually what saved my life," he said.
"Now, every time I talk to doctors they just scratch their heads and say we don't understand what's going on with you." His case has baffled veteran AIDS experts, including Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary general's envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa.
"I've never heard of anyone HIV positive for over 23 years, since virtually the beginning of the virus," Lewis said. "It's quite astonishing, and there has to be some kind of molecular composition of the body which permits this to happen."
There have been other death-defying long-term cases of HIV, most notably the cohorts of sex workers in Nairobi, Kenya, who contracted the virus many years ago and are still not sick.
Lewis calls these cases "anomalies" but doubts people in any significant numbers will build up natural immunity to AIDS. Milano chalks his case up to an intense fitness regimen, meditation, his activism and even drugs he takes for another condition. He also admits he's been lucky.
"I keep chugging along," Milano, an AIDS activist, said with a shrug. "Maybe it's just because I'm a Taurus and I'm so stubborn that I refuse to give in." That has meant standing firm in the face of tragedy.
In the 1980s and 1990s in New York's gay community, his friends and acquaintances were succumbing to AIDS with mind-numbing regularity. Milano has been fighting since 1988, urging the Reagan, Bush, Clinton and now Bush junior administrations to pledge more to fight the disease. -AFP
