By Rebecca Rakoczy, Special To The Bulletin

ATLANTA—Janis Griffin sees the statistics of HIV in real faces every day: in mothers and sisters, in fathers and sons, in teenagers who lived as though they were invincible.

They are living with AIDS; they are dying of it. And their numbers are increasing.

As a case manager for Fulton County DFACS (Department of Family and Children’s Services) at Grady’s Infectious Disease Program, and as a 45-year member of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, Griffin has been involved both at work and in her church with AIDS ministries and outreach, spreading the message of education and compassion.

It’s a message she herself had to learn 12 years ago.

Working with people with AIDS was a definite adjustment, she says. “Like everyone else, I was afraid and I had to get myself educated,” she said.

She recalls rural families leaving their very ill sons on the steps of Grady Hospital, out of ignorance and desperation. A caseworker trained to work with mentally ill patients, she saw the young men because her office was the closest to the hospital. “They were too weak to go further,” she recalled.

At the time, ignorance about how the disease was transmitted was the chief cause of much of her fear, she said. But she learned, and her caseload became all HIV-positive patients. She also saw how medications helped some of her clients live longer lives and she rejoiced with that knowledge.

But today, the fear of how the disease is transmitted has almost been replaced by a sort of complacency in the community, she says, and it is very dangerous. “The problem is we’ve got new medication to help keep the disease in check, but there is no cure. People see Magic Johnson and think that because he is showing no signs of the disease, he is cured. Well, there is no cure. They want to believe there is a cure, so they don’t behave in a way to keep them from getting the illness themselves.”

And the problem is still growing to encompass more of the community.

During her 12-year tenure as a case manager for HIV- positive patients, Griffin has seen the face of AIDS change from primarily young white gay males to heterosexual men and women and children. Increasingly she is seeing young African-American women and teenagers with the disease.

According to data in June from the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 64 percent of all women HIV/AIDS patients are now African-American women and 54 percent of all new HIV/AIDS patients are African-Americans, many of whom are teenagers. AIDS mortality rates remain 10 times higher among African-Americans than among whites. According to the CDC, between 650,000 and 900,000 Americans are infected with HIV.

That information is important to Griffin and members of the AIDS ministry team at Our Lady of Lourdes like Gail Kropf, Evette Oates and Sandy Johnson, who have started outreach to the teens and young people in their parish.

It’s a message that often must be told delicately for the primary way teens transmit the disease is through sexual contact, with injected drug use the secondary way of transmission.

“It’s a touchy subject—teens are getting infected through sexual activity. We would like them to follow the church’s teaching of abstinence, but we have to be aware what’s going on in the real world.”

As one of the more recognizable voices in the archdiocese, lending her talents to the choir at Our Lady of Lourdes for more than 40 years, and as a cantor twice a month at St. John Neumann Church in Lilburn, music is another way she says she can get the message across. “I live and breathe music,” she said. “I pray with music.”

On Sunday, Nov. 26, Griffin and members of the choir at Lourdes sang a spiritual called “Patchwork Quilt” from the group “Sweet Honey and the Rock,” a song that mourns and celebrates the lives of those who died of AIDS. The service commemorates World AIDS Day at OLL.

Yet Griffin, along with other ministry team members, knows that even with the rousing music of the choir, they are but a few voices in dealing with the problem. Currently, the Archdiocesan AIDS Task Force is inactive; Griffin had been a part of that group which she saw as “very effective.”

The need for such ministry is important, she says.

“There is still fear out there. I know members of our parish who are (HIV) positive and the fear is still there—they are afraid of public reaction. We have to get rid of the stigma and shame and let people know they are safe in the church. They need to talk, they need prayers.”