Whether or not the federal government officially recognized World AIDS Day on Monday was far from the minds of those gathered to mark the occasion at Suffolk County government center in Hauppauge.

Either way, said Ashley Nicholls and several other attendees living with HIV, they are proof of what World AIDS Day has represented since the first one in 1988: a commitment to research, funding and education about AIDS and the virus that causes it. A disease in the 1980s often viewed as a death sentence is now considered a chronic condition .

"I feel like change starts and ends with me, " said Nicholls, 28, of Riverhead, at the H Lee Dennison Building, site of Suffolk's third annual World AIDS Day event.

Nicholls, who was first diagnosed with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, a decade ago,

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