Week # Air Date

A special report AIDS in the Latino community. Two decades of living and dying with the disease.

Twenty years and counting and when we count there are now 900,000 people across this country living with aids. Look closely at the number of new infections and you'll find an alarming number of Latinos, a number out of proportion with their population, and they are people from all walks of life heterosexual men and women, partners of drug users, new born infants, and children. And while we now have powerful combinations of anti-HIV drugs that help many people live with the virus, for thousands of people these drugs make little difference. And that's where we'll start our program today in a community where the AIDS cocktail is not an option, where health care is minimal, we travel to the Dominican Republic. There we find an unusual intersection of people living with AIDS, folk healers trying to help them, and a Chicano scientist who believes there are clues to a cure in his ground breaking research on natural medicines used on the island. We begin our story with a young man living in a small, dusty, crowded town called Higuey. [Teo] is infected with HIV.

In this country AIDS unfolds differently. We know this because we've watched it for two decades across generations of families. And in families there are those that are born with the disease and there are those that do not have AIDS but live in its shadow daily because a parent is infected. That's the story of too many young people and too many families in the Latino community. Latino USA's Michele Garcia has our report.