MANHATTAN — Nurse Arthur Fitting, who has worked with HIV and AIDS patients in the West Village for more than 25 years, remembers a real-life version of the new movie "Contagion" at the start of the AIDS epidemic.
People wouldn't shake Fitting's hand if they knew he had been working with HIV patients. Shopkeepers wouldn't accept money from people with the gaunt look of the disease then.
"People wanted to stay away from people with this illness because so much was unknown," Fitting said in an interview Friday.
"It was as close to a military situation as I can imagine. You didn't have a building blowing up, but you did have people dying who you didn't know how to treat," he said.
Almost 20 years after the peak of HIV diagnoses in the city, the West Village is now an important place for people who are aging with the disease, according to Fitting's employer, the Visiting Nurse Service of New York.
Before National HIV/AIDS and Aging Awareness Day on Sunday, VNSNY released data showing that contrary to popular belief, HIV in New York is not a young person's disease.
People 40 and older make up nearly 42 percent of new HIV diagnoses and 75 percent of people living with HIV, according to city Health Department statistics from 2009, the most recent data available.
"A significant number of people with HIV, because of anti-retroviral drugs, are aging with the disease," said VNSNY's director of HIV/AIDS services, Andresa Person. Older HIV and AIDS patients often face multiple health problems, she said.
VNSNY nurses, social workers, nutritionists and home health aides treat 235 HIV and AIDS patients citywide, about half of whom are 55 or older. The group, which was founded in 1893, was the city's first care provider for people with HIV and AIDS, Persons said.
Many of VNSNY's clients live in the West Village, including at the Bailey-Holt House, the residence for people living with HIV and AIDS located on Christopher Street near the West Side Highway.
Fitting, a 58-year-old former Army reserve nurse, sees about 20 patients in the West Village every week and said that changes in the West Village and Greenwich Village in the last 10 years have complicated their care.
"With the influx of higher cost real estate, the elderly people in the Village have had to find other housing," he said.
The closing of St. Vincent's has also significantly affected Village seniors living with HIV and AIDS, Fitting said.
"Even a change in physicians, much less the disappearance of a whole facility, has a big impact on their care," he said. "It doesn't take much to rock the boat for this population."
Despite misinformation-fueled fears of HIV in the Village in the 1980s and 1990s — when city AIDS diagnoses soared from 160 in 1981 to 12,745 in 1993 — Fitting said the area was home to "a community effort" of churches and social organizations that supported HIV patients.
"That community effort is not as visible today, but it still exists," Fitting said.
Additional support matters to people who often have little family support, he said.
"The greatest thing I've seen is what support can do for someone's health," he said.
