AIDS wasn't a human to human contagion back in the timeslot the movie represented. Still a simian disease locked far back up the Congo (Zaire) River. When logging opened roads back into the bush, monkies were hunted and ate (and often replaced the European propensity for sheep as reproductive recepticles) and the mutations from ape to ape to human to human began.
She apparently succumbed to the years of smackin' as a needle ho.
I watch the movie on occassion too - miss the oysters, pluff-mud tidal flats, the Angel Oak, the hospitality of either the white priviledged culture or the island black culture - never at the same time though. Flounder, Sabal palms, southern yellow pines...boiled peanuts, Voo-Doo, and boats comin' in and heading out of Charleston harbor from and to the rest of the world. Ashley River, the Stono, and the U.S.S. Yorktown.