Back when 17,000 AIDS cases had been reported nationwide – and New York City accounted for a third of them – people suspected of having AIDS would be refused treatment by some medical personnel, landlords and employers kicked them out, families turned their backs, and ex-wives used the remote possibility that a former husband might become infected as grounds for seeking court orders denying them the right to visit their children. But we’ve come a long way from that time.

For a while, AIDS was the talk of the town – from protests to benefits to experimental treatments. But AIDS has dropped off the radar for most of us, it seems, just when it is exploding as an issue around the world and when blacks and Latinos in this country have become the new face of AIDS.

Coincidence? I think not.

Some 42 million people have HIV, according to the United Nations’ AIDS organization, UNAIDS – and 5 million of those people were infected last year.

In New York City, upward of 140,000 have HIV or AIDS. But, according to the health commissioner, only about 75,000 of those people know that they are infected. Some may suspect it; others are clueless.

The most surprising trend here, as it is worldwide, is that HIV and AIDS among women is outpacing that among men. You can especially see that in New York City jails.

I came across a 1991 clipping the other day that was a reminder of where we were just a decade ago, when black Americans were just opening their eyes to what was happening, focusing initially on some of their most talented on stage and screen or in the church choir loft.

Pernessa Seele, God bless her, had corralled enough church folk to pull off a benefit concert in Harlem. A participating Broadway performer, Hinton Battle, was quoted as saying: “I am afraid to pick up the phone, sometimes. If I haven’t heard from someone in a long time, I know it isn’t good news.”

We’ve moved a bit beyond whispering about whether someone has AIDS, but we’ve also arrived at a time when the fight is not as noisy or assertive as it was when gay white men were the face of AIDS and a sense of urgency was inescapable.

“I think black folks have not just been very vocal in our neighborhoods,” says Seele, founder and director of the nonprofit Balm in Gilead. “In the 1980s, the white gay community made all the noise. Now their voices have gone away, and the people with the problem – people of color – haven’t made their voices heard. We are doing more work in our community, but we are not making a lot of noise nationally.”

And thus, for many Americans who once paid attention, World AIDS Day was a non-occasion. But AIDS hasn’t gone away. The problems associated with AIDS – from health care to orphaned children – have not gone away; indeed, they’ve multiplied.

Recognizing that, many churches focused on AIDS on Sunday. BET, the black-oriented cable network, devoted hours of programming to AIDS.

That burst of visibility should make more people aware, but for people like Ofelia Barrios, the director of programming for a coalition of AIDS-related organizations in upper Manhattan, “World AIDS Day is every day.”

“For us,” she said, “HIV/AIDS is a state of emergency because our communities are being affected in disproportionate numbers in New York City.”

While AIDS is no longer something from which we run in this country, the same cannot be said for other nations. While this year’s World AIDS Day theme – Live and Let Live – sounds like a James Bond movie, in reality it was meant to urge governments, industry and nonprofits to do all they can to assure that people with HIV/AIDS can get proper medical attention as well as improved basic living conditions – and that others do not use the illness as justification for ostracizing those with the disease or even killing them.

There is no Jerry Lewis of AIDS, but perhaps the rap musician Sean “Puffy” Combs is gearing up for such a role. After a recent tour of South Africa, where he and singer Alicia Keys headlined a concert, he declared: “I don’t think you see enough of this story in your face.” If you know what’s going on and do nothing about it, he said, “you are almost an accessory to the genocide.”

Yes, we’ve come a long way, baby. But AIDS hasn’t been licked, even though that fact may seem like a secret, as quietly as it’s being kept.

– E.R. Shipp’s e-mail address is eshipp2002@hotmail.com.