Director Lisa Biagiotti
spent two years travelling around the South
interviewing people about AIDS to make a film,
deepsouth.
She found rural AIDS is a bigger and faster-growing problem
than AIDS in center cities,
yet most health and prevention funding goes to urban areas.
The root cause seemed clear to her: poverty.
Here’s some deeper dirt (literally) on rural poverty in the U.S.,
and one thing we know can help with that: distributed solar power,
for jobs, for reduced electrical bills, and for energy independence.
What politician wouldn’t want jobs for their constituents?
The director said the screening at
VSU at the end of November drew more people than the
day before in Little Rock.
There were clearly more than 150 in the audience in Valdosta.
It’s a topic very relevant to here, as
Dean Poling wrote in the VDT 26 November 2012,
Organizers note that Georgia is ranked sixth highest nationally for
its cumulative number of AIDS cases reported through December 2009.
More than 40,000 known HIV/AIDS cases were reported in Georgia as of
2010.
The South Health District’s 10 counties, which include Lowndes and
surrounding counties, report 950 confirmed cases of HIV/AIDS, while
many more are likely infected and risk becoming sick because they
are not being treated. More specifically, there are about 460
reported cases in Lowndes County.
In reporting these numbers, HIV is the virus (HIV disease) and AIDS
is the medical diagnosis made by a doctor of the symptoms, according
to South Health District.
It’s a great movie and I highly recommend it.
Director Biagiotti spent a substantial amount of her own money and two years to make
this film, yet there are aspects she could only note in passing,
such as incarceration.
She can’t be expected to have researched every aspect;
maybe somebody else can step up and help follow more threads.
The movie starts with some maps about poverty and AIDS in the South.
It did not, however, look outside the South for poverty.
Here are better
poverty maps, from the CDC:
Continue reading →
the only public access to the Alapaha river in Lowndes county. Because then we have to go to lake land in Lanier county to there public access boat ramp to put in or go to Stateville in Echols county to there DNR public access boat ramp to put in. The Hotchkiss Bridge or now people are calling it Hotchkiss landing is a good check point for the fisherman. I’m concern because there is not many public a ccess on this Alapaha river. Well if Naylor ever expands there wouldn’t be any water recreation use in this community. That is not good for our community. People all over this area use this public access for fishing & they bring there kids and there family together to have a family picnic, swimming. People go down there to relax and listen to the water hitting the rocks and hear the birds making different noise. This is a nice place to take picture of the nature. The Hotchkiss Bridge is a top location for bird watching in the State of Georgia. Birding enthusiasts interested in experiencing the many wonderful bird families in the surrounding areas of Hotchkiss Bridge. The Hotchkiss Bridge has a historic value to our community. It use to be the old major highway to go to the next town. Many of our community had there ancestry use that old Hotchkiss Bridge. I know the bridge has been gone for many years. Now it’s a public boat ramp. The Hotchkiss Bridge has history and It would be a good asset for Lowndes county to have….
