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Friday Marks 30th World AIDS Day

Lawrence Jackson
/
Obama White House Archives
President Barack Obama speaks on World AIDS Day in 2011.

This Friday is World AIDS Day, which has been observed on Dec. 1 since its inception in 1988. The '80s were the peak of the AIDS crisis and all of the stigmas and misinformation that came with it, but by the end of the decade, World AIDS Day was instituted to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS and show support to those living with HIV.

 

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS reports there were approximately 36.7 million people living with HIV globally in 2016, and the disease was equally spread between both sexes. Last year, there were one million deaths from AIDS reported by the UN.

 

Dr. Yeneneh Desta is the regional medical director for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. He went to medical school in Ethiopia and, following his residency, was a fellow in infectious disease at Jackson Health Systems Miami and in HIV at the University of Miami.  He has been treating HIV patients mainly since 2012.

 

Dr. Desta joins Gulf Coast Live to talk more about his last four years working at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation's Fort Myers office.

 

 

Also joining the show is Jeanmanno Titus, the HIV/AIDS program coordinator for Southwest Florida with the Florida Department of Health.

Rachel Iacovone is a reporter and associate producer of Gulf Coast Live for WGCU News. Rachel came to WGCU as an intern in 2016, during the presidential race. She went on to cover Florida Gulf Coast University students at President Donald Trump's inauguration on Capitol Hill and Southwest Floridians in attendance at the following day's Women's March on Washington.Rachel was first contacted by WGCU when she was managing editor of FGCU's student-run media group, Eagle News. She helped take Eagle News from a weekly newspaper to a daily online publication with TV and radio branches within two years, winning the 2016 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for Best Use of Multimedia in a cross-platform series she led for National Coming Out Day. She also won the Mark of Excellence Award for Feature Writing for her five-month coverage of an FGCU student's transition from male to female.As a WGCU reporter, she produced the first radio story in WGCU's Curious Gulf Coast project, which answered the question: Does SWFL Have More Cases of Pediatric Cancer?Rachel graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University with a bachelor's degree in journalism.