November 3, 2008

Beth Benne: Nursing HIV Awareness

Beth Benne, RN, is HIV negative, but the virus has impacted her life. In 1981, the dawn of the U.S. epidemic, she met AIDS head-on. Fresh out of college, she worked the night shift at a hospital near Los Angeles. The images of illness and suffering from those days have followed her ever since. They are part of what inspires her to supervise a biannual HIV/AIDS awareness week as the director of the student health center at Pierce College, a community commuter school in Woodland Hills, California. POZ talked to Benne as she prepared for this year’s awareness week, which ended October 31.

What happens during HIV/AIDS awareness week?

This has been going on since before I came to Pierce College in 1993. We bring in free, confidential testing with the AIDS Foundation Los Angeles and the LA County Public Health Department. But since we began the project, we’ve expanded to two weeks. For the week before the testing, we bring in speakers on HIV, people living with the virus, from the Being Alive Speaker’s Bureau. We encourage all the teachers here to invite a speaker into their classes. This year we also have Dr. Michael Gottlieb speaking. [Gottlieb reported some of the first cases of what has come to be known as AIDS.]

Do you also provide HIV testing during the rest of the year?

We do, but we don’t have the budget for free testing, which we provide during awareness week. We push HIV testing whenever a student requests a test for chlamydia or gonorrhea. But on the whole, students aren’t thinking about HIV when they ask about sexually transmitted infections [STIs]. I also make sure they know that there’s a difference between a bacterial STI, like chlamydia or syphilis, and a viral infection like HIV. The bacterial STIs are fixable.

What is the goal of the awareness week?

My goal is to educate as many students as I possibly can. I teach that there is no such thing as safe sex—there’s only safer sex. Unless we’re practicing abstinence, which is the only thing that’s 100 percent safe, we have to be smart and use our heads. We have to be aware.

I’m disappointed when the numbers of people being tested are down. Ten to 12 years ago we would get 300 students coming in to be tested during our awareness drive. Now I’m lucky to get 100 to 150.

In the early, horrific days of AIDS, I met amazing individuals dealing with life-threatening infections. They were terrified by what life had handed them. But they and their families were amazing, so courageous. And when I first took over awareness week here, back in 1993, many of our speakers for the week were so ill—often they needed morphine even to get through the day. Many of our speakers died. We were always losing speakers in those days.

And now, at Pierce, I deal with kids every day who need pregnancy and STI tests because they’re practicing unprotected sex. These are kids who have had the word AIDS in their vocabulary since birth, but they didn’t see the world change as we did. They didn’t see the dramatic, terrifying change [at the beginning of the epidemic]. That’s why we need HIV awareness week so much now.

Do you think the education about safer sex works?

Somewhat, but I think the real way to get young people to protect themselves is to increase people’s self-esteem. Unsafe sex is directly related to a lack of self-esteem. You have to think you’re worth protecting, it’s worth it for you to plan ahead—and that’s so huge, especially for women. I don’t know how to fix that.

There is still so much stigma surrounding HIV. Recently, a student asked me about specific risks of HIV transmission in casual contact. Her cousin from abroad was staying at her mother’s house. The cousin revealed that he was HIV positive, and the mother wanted to kick him out. The examples the student kept asking about were far-fetched—impossible to contract HIV through any of them—but at least she was asking. Sadly, the end of the story is that her mother remained uncomfortable having the cousin in the house and he had to leave, and to leave the country.

What motivates you to work so hard on this project?

I do it because when I was a new college graduate in 1981 I began meeting people with full-blown AIDS. I worked first in an oncology ward, where people who had leukemia were given blood that most likely gave them HIV. Some of those people had gotten into remission with leukemia, but then they died of AIDS. That kind of thing leaves a very lasting impression. And I also consider this work—raising awareness and encouraging people to be tested, fighting HIV stigma—to be my job. It’s part of my job in health care. And it fits, because I have a personal commitment to spreading the word and getting people tested.

Do others in the Pierce community support HIV education?

There are so many people here who are behind this effort. We have a wonderful combination of faculty and administrative support. The teachers don’t mind interrupting their class schedules, giving time to a speaker living with HIV.

I think this cooperation is largely a result of my predecessors, the people who initiated the HIV education. They were passionate about this work, and they wanted to get rid of the discrimination involved with HIV. They set the precedent that makes it easy for me to continue. There are so many people—at the college and all over—devoted to the spread of [HIV] education. I’m not sure the ears are hearing it, but it is being talked about.

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Previous Comments:

Kirk, Dallas/Fort Worth, 2008-11-16 14:51:50
Thank you Beth, for taking this as your own. This type of dedication is needed in so many more campuses. I am inspired to do so much more.

Robert Lopez, Clermont, FL, 2008-11-13 23:47:34
I am very inspires with Nursing Beth Benne, she try to go out of her way to make a different, like me I was HIV-,until 12/03 it like my life die that date,and my life it been like hell, I was good, I work as a correction Officer in nyc and while checking a use razor that the inmate was unable to remove , I proceeded to open the use razor and cut my left index finger ,I infrom my sup. and write a exposure incident report, and like a one yr. from the incident I get very sick with fever 102,pneum

Judy Sandeen, RN, Hastings, NE, 2008-11-06 16:03:27
Congratulations,, Beth! Colleges need to be leading in this effort, as young people aren't paying close attention to HIV. At Hastings College, peer educators have been teaching other students since 1991, and they're in the curriculum for all incoming students. Our administration is so supportive of our efforts!

kevin Dawn Letro, , 2008-11-06 10:46:31
hi my name is dawn an hiv+..im 20 years old & just graduated in nursing..im still in the process wherein im coping up with the diagnosis i have..im in asia and one of my worries is that if its possible for me to work abroad as a nurse, i definitely not be in a hospital setting but im planning to be a nurse instructor teach in the academe..i will really much appreciate if you could help and provide important details about working abroad..thank you