The AIDS Memorial Quilt Panels
UNCW has joined with community partners to engage with National Women and Girl’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day throughout the month of March.
These events aim to increase awareness, decrease stigma, and spark conversations. It highlights the work being done to reduce HIV among women and girls while showing support for those with HIV. We welcome the AIDS Quilt to UNCW to encourage reflection of this pandemic.
The AIDS Quilt is a memorial, a form of activism, and wake-up call to end stigma. Its panels are 3x6 – the size of a grave. They are made by friends, relatives, neighbors, and co-workers. It is an epic 54-ton tapestry that includes nearly 50,000 panels to more than 105,000 individuals. It is the premiere symbol of the AIDS pandemic, a living memorial to a generation lost to AIDS and an important HIV prevention education tool. The Quilt is considered the largest community art project in history and the largest piece of folk art in the world.
As the largest community arts project in the world, the AIDS Memorial Quilt is a teaching tool to help educate people about the story of AIDS, remember the more than 700,000 U.S. lives lost to disease, and to support local HIV/AIDS service organizations, LGBTQ+ centers, and support awareness about health and social justice issues. Explore more at aidsmemorial.org.
Since the onset of the epidemic in the early 1980s, 79.3 million people worldwide have been infected and 36.3 million have died of AIDS. In 2020, 37.7 million people were living with HIV and 1.5 million (equivalent to the total population of Charlotte, Raleigh, and Wilmington combined), were newly infected.
This is our problem. The South has the highest number of people living with HIV in the USA. Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino people are disproportionately affected by HIV due to disparities in access to education and health care.
What Can You Do?
- Destigmatize testing – get tested and support your friends and family to get tested.*
- Get educated – PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis) is highly effective for preventing HIV. PEP can be taken after possible HIV exposure. Medication can reduce viral loads to undetectable levels. U=U: Undetectable means untransmutable.
- Use your training from UNCW to challenge the status quo and end the pandemic.
- Fight for funding. State, Federal, and global funds make a significant difference in the fight.
UNCW’s Student Health Center offers HIV testing. Call 910.962.3280 to make an appointment.
