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 →
Mayor Gayle said CAG is a group of representatives from the county
and all the local cities, the two school districts (Valdosta and Lowndes County),
VSU, Wiregrass Tech, the Industrial Authority, the Chamber, and he may have
said others.
It’s an attempt at better local cooperation, specifically about issues
that cross all the various local governmental and non-governmental groups.
So far they’ve had two meetings, Continue reading 
