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Nina
Martinez was 8 years old when she announced to her elementary school classmates
she was related to legendary basketball player Magic Johnson. "Wow,
how can that be?" they asked. "We both have HIV," she
answered.
Though she tended to joke about her illness
at first, the reality of living with HIV began to set in when her principal
questioned whether she should stay in school (she did) and she began taking
AZT, the breakthrough antiretroviral drug, four times a day, including
a dose in the middle of the night. Every three months, she traveled from
her home in New Jersey, where HIV treatment was unavailable, to Washington,
D.C., for follow-up visits at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Her parents
learned of her HIV status in December 1991, a month after Johnson announced
publicly he was HIV positive and a decade after scientists, physicians,
and public health workers first detected AIDS.
"The doctor told me that I had HIV
a month after my parents were told," recalls Martinez, now 23 and
an MSPH student in epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health
(RSPH). "He asked me, ‘Do you know what that is?' I
just equated it to Magic Johnson. That's how I understood it."
It was pure accident that Martinez's
family found out about her disease several years after she was infected.
This "accident" eventually set her on a course leading her
to Atlanta and the RSPH.
Six weeks after her premature birth in 1983,
Martinez required a blood transfusion for anemia. The transfusion worked
its magic, and Martinez grew up healthy and happy in a military family
that included a twin sister. In December 1991, the 8-year-old Martinez
underwent eye surgery. The surgeon operated not knowing she had mistakenly
been given an HIV test usually reserved for hospital patients 15 and older.
A few days later, Martinez's parents learned she was HIV positive.
To make matters worse, her family learned
that the military knew in 1989 that Martinez had acquired HIV through
the transfusion she received after her birth. The military sent a letter
of notification to the family's address in Hawaii. The letter never
reached them at their new address in New Orleans, and no one followed
up on her case. The Department of Defense's Blood Look-Back program—implemented
to notify patients infected with HIV through blood transfusions—had
failed. "The military knew about my HIV two years before I ever
received a diagnosis," says Martinez in a story about her on the
website for Hope's Voice, an organization that educates college
students about HIV/AIDS. "A notification that takes two years is
certainly not ‘timely' as the prevailing rules mandated. As
it was, my diagnosis was not a proper notification but pure accident."
CROSSING
PATHS
In
1993, the Martinez family crossed paths with James Curran, then assistant
surgeon general and associate director for HIV/AIDS with the CDC. Curran
wrote a letter to Martinez's father about the CDC's role in
protecting the blood supply. Martinez still has the letter in the original
envelope.
"Nina contacted me before she applied
to Rollins because I had been in contact with her father when I was at
the CDC," says Curran, now dean of RSPH. "She wanted to know
if I was the same person who had written her father several years earlier.
I met her in Washington at one of our alumni meetings and introduced her
to our school, and she applied here to become one of our students."
Martinez holds an undergraduate degree in
mathematics and government from Georgetown University. She chose to study
in Washington because she loved the city where she first received her
HIV care. On top of studying, holding down two part-time jobs, and living
on her own for the first time, Martinez sought to balance the demands
of being a young adult student and HIV positive. In 2005, the "Road
to Hope Tour," sponsored by Hope's Voice, made its first stop
at Georgetown, where Martinez heard college students like herself talk
about living with HIV/AIDS. Touched and inspired, she works closely with
the group today, speaking on the group's behalf at Emory and other
colleges and universities and traveling to New York to work on the group's
national ad campaign, "Does HIV Look Like Me?"
After graduating from Georgetown, Martinez
sought a way to combine her love of math, government, medicine, and public
health. She chose Atlanta because it was a prime location to study public
health and receive regular health care at Emory.
"I came here because there was such
a good HIV-centric group of people," she says. "There are
people here who have been in the field since 1981." That, of course,
includes Curran, who has mentioned Martinez in his presentations on the
25th anniversary of AIDS this year. "That's no small cookie
to swallow!" Martinez says.
Her challenge at hand is juggling her studies
in epidemiology while carving out more time to travel and speak to college
students through Hope's Voice. "I'm speaking out because
I want everyone to speak out too," says Martinez, who hopes one
day to work in the health policy arena. "It's the 25th year
of AIDS, and I've had HIV for 23 of them. I feel I need to be out
there more, at least this year."
What about the future? "Like Dr. Curran
has said, HIV/AIDS is a young disease, and it's going to take time,
so we need to be patient to find a vaccine," she says. "I
can't recall any other disease that's had such an effect on
culture and social norms. It affects who we are, how we raise our children,
every part of our lifestyle. When we can be comfortable with each other
and reach a certain level of tolerance, maybe we can work our way toward
a cure."
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