15,000 turn out for AIDS Walk Philly

Pat Lavelle attended Philadelphia's first AIDS walk in 1987, seeking emotional support and information to help her brother, James, a cardiologist who had just been found to have the disease.

Back then, people still spoke of AIDS in hushed tones. Many didn't speak of it at all.

"I came to the first walk just to be in a place where the word AIDS was being said," Pat Lavelle said.

Twenty-four years after that first walk, and 15 years after her brother's death in 1996, Lavelle was at the Art Museum again Sunday. The West Philadelphia resident had never missed AIDS Walk Philly, and she was not about to let a knee injury that required a crutch stop her this year.

As the sun shone brightly, she joined 15,000 others to travel the 8-mile Art Museum loop.

The walkers raised $350,000 for the AIDS Fund, which supports 30 partner organizations that provide services and educate about the illness.

Many walkers carried signs with photos of those they lost in the years when AIDS took its victims quickly.

Nancy Bragg walks every year to remember her brother, Arthur Speck Jr., who died in 1994. They grew up in Tuckerton, N.J. Telling people of his illness was painful.

"Especially in a small town like Tuckerton, it was like, 'Oh, my God, AIDS,' " Bragg said.

Since the early days of a disease first called "gay-related immune deficiency," or GRID, AIDS has become a global epidemic, infecting intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs, and children.

Philadelphia has been especially hard hit. Nearly 1.3 percent of the population here is living with HIV/AIDS, one of the highest infection rates for a large U.S. city, according to the Department of Public Health.

The development of antiretroviral "cocktails" in the 1990s transformed HIV from a short-term death sentence to an illness that many people live with for decades.

"When we first started walking, we were walking to help people die with dignity, and now we walk to help people live with dignity," said Robb Reichard, executive director of the AIDS Fund.

But advances in treatment have brought new challenges. It's harder to raise money, even though there is still no cure for AIDS. In the 1990s, when Tom Hanks played a Philadelphia lawyer who loses his job after his employer learned he had AIDS, the local walk sometimes raised as much as $1 million.