Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) Conference and Expo

Meeting Abstracts: Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) Conference and Expo Clearwater Beach, FL, USA. 9-11 June 201

“the Littlest Victims”: Pediatric Aids And The Urban Ecology Of Health In The Late-Twentieth-Century United States

“The Littlest Victims” tells the untold history of children with AIDS, their families, and their caregivers while examining the structural causes, rise, and decline of pediatric AIDS in the U.S. from the 1950s through the early 2000s. This history complements and complicates the grand narrative of AIDS in the United States, one largely focused on how gay men and AIDS activists coped with, and influenced, the nation’s response to AIDS. Not only did HIV-AIDS affect children differently, pediatric AIDS disproportionately affected families of color living in poor urban environments. In this respect, the history of pediatric AIDS is inseparable from how Americans perceived and responded to urban poverty in the late twentieth century. My dissertation thus explores the relationship between HIV-AIDS, families of color, and the urban spaces in which pediatric AIDS was most prevalent. It argues that the physical and social environments that structured the experiences of families of color living in poor urban neighborhoods defined the realities and perceptions of pediatric AIDS. Pediatric AIDS arose from the post-World War II urban geographies of concentrated poverty, racialized segregation, and urban-renewal policies, creating an ecology where HIV-transmission proliferated in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then, as pediatric AIDS gained scientific, public health, cultural, and political visibility during the mid 1980s and early 1990s, it became inextricably linked to the real and imagined problems of the “inner city.” This cultural framing of pediatric AIDS profoundly influenced the way Americans understood and responded to the disease among children and their families. From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, teams of nurses navigated the complexities of caring for sick children alongside the problems of poverty that challenged caregivers in the home and hospital. During those same years, the advent of antiretroviral medications proved effective in drastically reducing the transmission of HIV in utero and at birth. However, the success of such biomedical solutions to pediatric AIDS had a paradoxical effect: the “medical-progress” narratives that accompanied these advances unintentionally undermined community-based efforts to address the larger social, economic, and environmental factors that put children at risk for HIV-AIDS in the first place

A tangled pathology: how AIDS became a "family disease" in Newark, New Jersey, 1970-1997

As AIDS proliferated in Newark, New Jersey through the 1980s, local AIDS-care advocates conceptualized AIDS in ways that reflected the disease’s impact on Newarkers. In reframing a problem that was predominately cast as a “gay disease” in North America, AIDS activists in Newark sought to highlight the growing prevalence of HIV and AIDS among urban communities of color. These efforts sought to direct national attention and resources towards affected “at risk” Newarkers by self-consciously portraying HIV and AIDS as a disease of the family. The lynchpin in this discourse was the pediatric AIDS patient. Discussions of HIV-positive children, and the “family disease” frame, became normalizing shorthand for addressing the complex biological transmission of the disease. By the late 1980s, advocates for Newark recognized the political utility in characterizing AIDS as a family disease at a time when the federal government was preparing to allocate funds for the areas hardest hit by the epidemic. This unique discourse was particularly useful in not only drawing attention to the problem of AIDS, but also to the societal “ills” associated with the disease’s prevalence among impoverished communities of color in Newark. As the family disease discourse evolved, Newark came to represent the ubiquitous, albeit insidious, urban problems that contributed to and exacerbated the epidemic in similar U.S. cities. Reserved almost exclusively to descriptions of families of color, the family disease discourse must be understood as—an implicit, if not explicit—response to mainstream perceptions of the inner city. Efforts to cope with AIDS in Newark benefited from the family disease script. Yet the legacy of the family disease discourse perhaps further encumbered cultural perceptions of inner city families as well. The family disease discourse thus inextricably linked the AIDS epidemic in impoverished communities color, and inner city families, to the pernicious social pathologies narrative that had over-determined perceptions of Newark since the late1960s.M.A.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Jason M. Chernesk