Summer Graham, the liaison to District 7 from the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services, presented San Francisco State University with a Certificate of Honor during the 19th Annual SFSU AIDS Day Commemoration in Jack Adams Hall.

“I just want to congratulate SFSU for their efforts and endless contributions,” said Graham. “Since 1986, SFSU has helped spread HIV/AIDS awareness and I’m proud to present SFSU with a certificate that shows our appreciation.”

Over a 100 students including members of the SFSU AIDS Coordinating Committee attended the commemoration, which was split into two segments.

The first half allowed students of the Nigerian Dance Association to perform two interpretive dances. The first dance told the story of a young girl infected with HIV and her struggles for finding acceptance amongst her peers, one of the members said, and the second dance was a traditional Nigerian dance.

The second segment was an open-ended question and answer session with three members of San Francisco’s Bay Positives, an organization for young people living with HIV/AIDS. They answered questions regarding their health, relationship issues and struggles of living with HIV/AIDS.

All three members stressed the importance of being aware and educating oneself about the disease.

“This is something that should be talked about all the time,” said Carley Flores, a Bay Positives member . “HIV/AIDS holds the common stereotype of being a gay-related disease, but it’s really a socio-economic disease that can infect anyone. It’s just really hard to convince a community that has already been stigmatized with certain stereotypes.”

The commemoration was organized by the AIDS Coordinating Committee who also distributed 1,500 blue flags on the two lawns near Malcolm X Plaza. Each flag represents 22,000 people living with HIV, said Elena Rubio, a SFSU senior and member of the ACC, which is a total of 33.5 million people. In California alone, 151,000 people are infected with 7,000 brand new infections a year, said Rubio. In SF, three new people are infected everyday with HIV/AIDS.

The ACC is also responsible for the SFSU AIDS Memorial Quilt hanging in Jack Adams Hall, which has a rich background that can be read on the ACC’s website, www.sfsu.edu/~aidsinfo. SFSU is the only institution with it’s very own 12x12 quilt, according to the ACC website.