By Dawna Cornelissen

This past Friday, World AIDS Day 2006, I took a moment to reflect on the impact AIDS has had on my own life. I was born a year after the "discovery" of HIV. I have never known a world without it. I have seen it go through all of the myths from something only gay people get, to something you could get through casual contact, to what we know today: that you get it through certain body fluids, like blood and semen. Although I learned about HIV/AIDS in school (before the times of abstinence-only), I didn't know what the disease meant for me.

The first time I realized the seriousness of HIV/AIDS was through Pedro Zamora by watching the 1994 season of the Real World on MTV. It was the first time I "knew" someone with HIV. Watching someone on a day to day basis live with HIV helped to squash my misconceptions about the disease.