Fighting HIV With Education

Doug Halter never considered himself a pioneer. Or much of an activist. But that was before the plague.

It was before his longtime partner endured a torturous AIDS-related illness, dying at age 26. And it was before the disease began to ravage his own body, threatening to kill him too.

That is how he found himself on a recent morning in front of a group of sociology students at Ventura College, revealing details of his life that he never imagined he would make public.

Halter told the students that he is gay. And that he has AIDS. And that a decade ago, when he was first diagnosed, doctors told him he would not live to see his 30th birthday.

He turned 37 last month. And like a growing number of people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome, the Ventura resident has come to believe that he now has a chance of escaping the death sentence handed down with his diagnosis.

Buoyed by the emergence of powerful new drugs, called protease inhibitors, Halter is among those who are beating back the disease, reversing its effects and getting better in the process.

In this new battle he is indeed a pioneer, among the first 50 people in the nation to go on one of the newest drugs, called Crixivan, which has shown a remarkable ability to reduce the presence of the virus in the bloodstream.

And while he is far from cured, he now lives with a new hope that someday his body will be free from disease and that his future will be measured in spans of decades rather than years, months or days.

“Every time I turn around, it seems like there’s another chapter to this epidemic,” Halter told the students. “There’s a lot of reason for hope right now. Because of new treatments that are prolonging life, there’s more hope now than I’ve ever seen.”

The plague is by no means over. People will continue to be infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS. And people will continue to die from the disease, especially in areas of the world where the newest treatments are not readily available.

But there is widespread agreement that something significant has occurred over the last year, that the power of the newest drugs--when combined with others--is such that a diagnosis of HIV infection may no longer have to signify death.

“We don’t know if we’re talking about eradication or cure yet,” said Dr. R. Scott Hitt, Halter’s Beverly Hills physician and chairman of President Clinton’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.

“But we are certainly talking about the majority of patients getting long-term suppression of the virus,” he said. “We’ve made the first step. The second step is a cure, but we won’t know whether we have that for several years.”

Halter did not believe that AIDS would kill him. Call it denial. But even after testing positive for HIV in 1987, he believed that somehow he would beat the odds and live a long life.

But that was before his partner, Randy Morrison, got sick and the reality of AIDS hit home.

In the summer of 1990, Morrison lost 40 pounds and couldn’t walk anymore. He got worse as the months wore on and passed away by Christmas. Halter estimates that at least 40 other friends have suffered the same fate over the last six years.

“It seemed like the whole world was dying,” he said. “Of course, it was just my world.”

Faced with his own mortality, Halter got busy living.

He started working out and making it a priority to get enough sleep. He left a lucrative sales job and focused his energy on constructing houses on a Ventura hillside, as a way of generating a secure income for his future.

He joined an AIDS education campaign, going public with his story as a way of warning others that the disease can strike anywhere, any time.

In 1994, when the illness really started taking its toll, he signed up to take part in an experimental study of a new drug designed to interrupt the life cycle of the virus that causes AIDS.

Halter believed it was his last roll of the dice, an eleventh-hour gamble to save his life. And so far, it is paying off.

With AIDS, progress can be measured in numbers. Before Halter went on the trial, his T-cell count--the number of cells in the immune system that fight off infection--was 25 to 35. A healthy person has between 800 and 1,200 T-cells.

Within two months, his T-cells had doubled, and a few months later he had cracked triple digits. Now, on a four-drug cocktail mix that still includes Crixivan, his T-cell count hovers in the low 200s.

Just as important, the drug cocktail has reduced the viral load--the presence of virus in his blood--from 4.2 million particles per milliliter of blood to 22,000 particles. While that is still considered high, it is a profound improvement and one that is being experienced by AIDS patients on a routine basis.

“It’s not a cure, like a lot of people have been saying,” Halter said, careful not to give people the idea that all they have to do is pop a couple of pills to be rid of the disease. “But it sure does give us a fighting chance to reduce the numbers.”

In the war on AIDS, there are still plenty of battles to be fought.

Hitt is quick to point out that these new drugs don’t work for everybody, and that if the virus is not completely suppressed, resistance can build up to all the drugs a patient is taking.

And even for those patients in whom the viral load has dipped to zero, the virus could still be lurking in organs and other tissue--a problem on which researchers are now focusing their attention.

Of course, there is the problem of making these drugs affordable and available to all who need them. And there is the possibility that for people such as Halter, the drugs could eventually lose their effectiveness.

“I think the odds are great that he will be alive several years from now,” said Hitt, who practices in the Pacific Oaks Medical Group, the nation’s largest private practice specializing in AIDS.

“Even if these drugs wear off, clinically people will still be doing well for quite awhile,” he continued. “But if that happens, Doug and people like him are going to need more research. True, there are more options today than ever, but he could still need even more.”

For now, Halter will take what he can get. He feels like he has really bought back time over the last few years. And coming to grips with AIDS, he has pushed himself to do things--speaking in public, building hillside homes--that perhaps he never would have done.

He knows there are still plenty of hurdles. But the way he lives his life now, he believes he is at least trying to make every day count.

“No one knows how long they’ll live. No one has any guarantees,” he said. “I’ve learned that you’ve just got to enjoy every day. That way, in case something happens, you won’t have any regrets.”