On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control released its
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) containing a story on five Los Angeles homosexual men who had contracted pneumocystis pneumonia. In its inherently dry, clinical style, the CDC stated that "pneumocystis pneumonia in the United States is almost exclusively limited to severely immunosuppressed patients. The occurrence of pneumocystosis in these 5 previously healthy individuals without a clinically apparent underlying immunodeficiency is unusual."
For the next several years, the brutally wasting disease we now know as HIV/AIDS was, for all intents and purposes, ignored by the corporate news media, the U.S. government, and pretty much everyone else who wasn't particularly concerned with the well-being of gay men, IV drug users, hemophiliacs, and blood donation recipients. It took the death in October 1985 of a world famous actor, quite literally a man's man, to stun the general public into realizing "anyone" could become infected with HIV. Ironically, Rock Hudson had been diagnosed with the virus on June 5, 1984 - three years to the day after the first CDC report on the five L.A. gay men with the unusual pneumonia.
Today, the virus has stubbornly eluded a cure, although more successful (albeit insanely expensive) treatments have been developed. Over 22 million people worldwide have died from the disease, including over 500,000 in the United States. A million Americans are currently living with the virus and an additional 40,000 infections are expected to occur this year. Worldwide, an estimated 39 million people are afflicted; 2 million of those are under age 15. Of infected adults age 15 and up, just over half are women. Roughly 15.2 million children aged 17 and under are orphans due to AIDS. Approximately 2.8 million persons died in 2005, and 2.6 million deaths are forecast for 2006.
We can ponder what those numbers might instead be like if Hudson had died a few years earlier, or a powerful politician's child had come down with the virus in the early days, or the hands controlling the federal purse strings had not been of the limited government mindset, or gays and drug addicts had been considered human beings rather than deviants, or reelections depended on the hemophiliac vote. We can ponder for a little while, but not too long; we have to come back and face the harsh reality that, 25 years later, there are still not enough resources being committed to fight our generation's Black Death, and there are still misguided souls who believe HIV is divine retribution the queers brought upon themselves.
Take a moment today, if you haven't already, to remember the human beings behind these and all the other sad AIDS statistics.
Sources:
CDC. Pneumocystis Pneumonia - Los Angeles. MMWR, June 5, 1981.
CDC. Twenty-Five Years of HIV/AIDS - United States, 1981-2006. MMWR, June 2, 2006.
WHO/UNAIDS. 2006 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic.
PBS Frontline. The Age of AIDS.
Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic.