While the Zika virus is fading from the headlines, another threat is still quietly lurking, right here.

HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, causes AIDS, which has been linked to more than 600,000 deaths in America since it first bloomed in the 1980s.

Neither HIV nor AIDS have gone away; more than 12,000 Americans died of AIDS-related causes in 2012. Now, however, HIV is not a sentence to a lingering, wasting death. With proper drugs — rather expensive drugs, mind you — people carrying the HIV virus can lead healthy lives for decades without developing AIDS.

The key, of course, is knowing that you're a carrier, so you can be treated. Therein lies a paradox. The populations most likely to carry HIV — intravenous drug users and those engaging in unprotected, hazardous sex — are not the most likely to look after their health. Many don't have health insurance.

This is not a faraway problem. Health officials estimate that nearly 600 New Hanover County residents have HIV or AIDS, putting us in the top 10 counties in the state. (Brunswick and Pender counties trail, with a total of slightly more than 200 cases.)

Fortunately, New Hanover County health officials have been carrying out an aggressive program to screen people in homeless shelters, rehab centers and other facilities. Jail inmates — a population especially at risk — are being encouraged to take the test with incentives as cheap and simple as new socks or T-shirts.

Good on the New Hanover County Health Department. Their supervisors — and the county commissioners who fund them — must not allow these efforts to ebb.

We've already seen this year how a bipartisan coalition, trying to save money, gutted the state's mosquito-control programs — just as mosquito-borne Zika popped up on the public's radar. The General Assembly will be reconvening soon; fixing this will be a worthwhile chore.

AIDS, meanwhile, flutters in the background like a ghost.

New HIV cases still pop up in county, as many as 10 a year. That's not many, but right now, we're seeing a disturbing upsurge in heroin use. With a new epidemic of addiction, and less use of condoms as the AIDS scare fades, we could again see an epidemic like the one that took so many lives in the 1980s.

It's folly to say that the people who catch this virus deserve it. Germs have no morality. Those with HIV can infect innocent people: spouses, fiances, children.

We have to keep testing, and we have to keep funding a strong clinical response. Too much is at stake.

REPRINTED FROM THE NEW BERN SUN JOURNAL

Photo credit: Victor