Where are we in the struggle to end AIDS? How far have we come?
A piece in the New York Times today explores these questions and more, exemplifying the huge amount of work that must go into accurately covering a topic as significant as the AIDS crisis.
It turns out we’ve come a long way in the AIDS epidemic, and much of our generation has no idea how different things were 30-odd years ago. The writer of this article, linked above, also wrote the first New York Times piece about AIDS, when it was thought to be strongly tied to homosexual men.
This piece speaks volumes to journalists’ role in uncovering AIDS. My favorite section:
The epidemic has brought a new focus on the power of epidemiology to identify a disease’s transmission patterns long before discovery of its cause. In the early days, epidemiologists provided the evidence to show that AIDS could be transmitted through contaminated blood transfusions, a fact many blood bank officials initially refused to accept. Later, lessons learned from AIDS were instrumental in helping control tuberculosis and curbing the spread of SARS.
Yet AIDS still presents extraordinary challenges — not least to journalists trying to chronicle the epidemic’s unfolding story, to remind a new generation of the importance of safe sex, and to follow the sometimes halting effort to make effective drugs available to all who need them.
Read the article above to brush up on the history of AIDS and get a feel for what we’re hoping to accomplish soon. This is extremely important work and we need to recognize it.
To think, they called it GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) is appalling. I remember, as kid, that it was also referred to as the Gay Cancer.