World AIDS Day Preparations

So Iw as recently asked to speak at a World AIDS Day Event for a friend at his place of work. Leading up to my talk I am writing weekly blogs to give hte hitsory of HIV and its developments in our world.  After they have been published on his site for a few days I will post them here.

this is blog number 1. 

December 1 is World AIDS Day.  It is the one day a year when some Americans who rarely ever think of HIV/AIDS, may pause for a moment to think about the friends and family they know that are living with HIV/AIDS.  Or they may wonder if they know anyone who is living with HIV/AIDS.  For some, it means pinning a red ribbon to their shirt, or saying a little prayer. Others may take a moment to consider what they are wearing, considering if they own a pair of Product(RED) shoes or earrings, light a candle in their own spiritual path.  I’ve always tried to combine my activities on World AIDS Day, a little bit of remembrance for those lost to a battle, a war actually, that was fought with grave casualties, mostly in the 1980s and 1990s; along with a little bit of activism to try to prevent that death toll from increasing anymore than is necessary. 

The History:

In 1981, a group of doctors in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Europe began noticing extremely strange diagnoses of opportunistic infections among patients with no known immune deficiencies or other symptoms.  The majority of these cases earliest reported were among Homosexual Men, and they consisted of infections that normally only would affect those with severe immune system problems.

What spent years with misnomers including; Gay Cancer, Gay Plague, and Gay Related Immune disorder also spent years evading research conclusions from scientists.  The disease was blamed on everything from the specifics types of sex that Gay Men have, to the type of drugs that were popular among Gay Men in the 1970s and 1980s, to even possible fungal/bacterial toxins that were environmental in Gay Bars only(this seemed most outrageous because what bacteria or virus could only exist in Gay Bars?) By the end of the 1980s we had discovered that a retrovirus was responsible for the disease. We had names, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) -the complex of diseases and opportunistic infections that constituted a majorly compromised immune system. And Human Immunodeficiency virus (HIV) – the virus that causes the complex of problems. 

By the end of the 1980s Mass hysteria about AIDS had mostly, but entirely subsided in the United States.  WE had learned that the virus was worldwide, with cases popping up in Europe, Africa, the Carribean and Asia(though Asian communist countries would deny for years that they had AIDS victims) and we knew, finally, that it was not a gay disease.”  Scientists’ learned that the virus was spread in four ways, through the exchange of bodily fluids; Breast Milk, Semen, Blood and Vaginal Excretions; and though it had originally showed up in Gay Men and Drug Injectors primarily, the virus had no distinguishing characteristics between race, sexuality or socio-economic status.  The world population would be slow to follow in these revelations but would eventually catch on.

In the time that past between the first diagnosis and the end of the 1980s, thousands of blood transfusion recipients would receive HIV infected blood, because Blood banks were debating the cost effectiveness of testing for the virus, this would include hemophiliacs who received platelet transfusions as well.   Hundreds of thousands of Gay Men, and Injection Drug users would continue to transmit the disease from one to another.  It would be decades before Americans started to understand the need for syringe exchange among IV Drug Users, cutting over 70% of new infections when clean needles were distributed to drug users. 

The early 1980s were a time wrought with political inaction and massive protest and unrest, especially among the Gay Community (this was long before use of the acronym GLBT) with virtually no new information coming from the Government, and still a lack of test for the virus, or any treatment what so ever.  With a diagnosis toll rising above 3,000 by the mid-eighties, new organizations such at ACTUP(AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) formed to bring public attention and awareness to the Disease and the inaction that frustrated them.  With demonstrations such as throwing the ashes of cremated victims over the fence into the White House Lawn, storming onto the set of CBS Nightly News and throwing red paint onto mayors and officials in parades, ACTUP became one of the leading groups for organizing and bringing forward the issue of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. 

By the end of the 1980s Hundreds of Americans had died of HIV/AIDS and Thousands more were infected.  AZT, the first wave of HIV medications had been introduced, and the struggle about access, with the drug costing thousands of dollars a month, not on insurance formularies yet for most patients, and in low levels of production patients were stealing the medication from hospitals and nurses and doctors were sneaking their friends onto trial lists. 

In the 1980s the worst, farthest reaching and most deadly pandemic in recent history crept its way out into the spotlight of the American mindset and onto the global stage.   When the 1990s began, there were precious few answers still, slightly more hope in the heavily hit immigrant and gay communities, but lots of passion and action.  When I begin my Worlds AIDS Day observations on December 1, every year, I start by thinking about when I was barely cognitive, but that impacted my life so much. The death of Rock Hudson, the disrupting of a press conference with Margaret Heckler (Reagan’s Secretary of Health and Human Services) and a handful of gay men with purple lesions on their chests and neck, changed the world; changed the way we view sex in American, and Healthcare and Medication Access worldwide.  The first of the last 3 and half decades that we have face this crisis, is perhaps one of the most socially influential in American history.