AProudLefty
He sucks Damocles' dick. :)
The rush hour traffic was tightening up, but Anthony Fauci, making the short commute from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to his home in Northwest Washington, D.C., wasn’t thinking about the flashing brake lights up ahead. Instead, his mind was consumed with strange reports of an unexplained disease among gay men on the other side of the country.
At that moment 40 years ago, no one could have guessed they were witnessing the dawn of a worldwide outbreak that would infect more than 75 million people and kill some 35 million.
The first hint that something ominous was arising came in a little-noticed item in the June 5, 1981 edition of the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR): Five gay men in Los Angeles had been treated for pneumocystis pneumonia, a rare fungal infection of the lungs caused by a severely weakened immune system. Not mentioned in the report: Two of the men had already died. Another would soon succumb to the infection.
Then came a second MMWR report in early July. Now no fewer than 26 gay men—this time not only in LA, but also in New York and San Francisco—were suffering from both pneumocystis and Kaposi’s sarcoma, a lesion-causing cancer of the blood vessels, and other opportunistic infections.
“I got chills up and down my spine,” Fauci recalls. “I said to myself, ‘Oh, my God, this has to be a new disease.’”
“I kept going over it in my mind,” he says, “and the only conclusion I could come up with was that we were dealing with a brand new infection. It was likely a virus, because if it was a bacteria, we could probably see it. Viruses tend to be elusive.”
Fauci and his colleagues went with the tentative assumption that this new virus was zoonotic—originally transmitted from animals—because about 75 percent of all infections in humans start out that way. (Their assumption would prove correct.)
A month after that, on September 24, 1982, the CDC applied a name to the new disease: acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). In mid-December, CDC reported that infants in New York, New Jersey, and California were showing signs of AIDS. The growing number of cases in the gay community was particularly devastating.
Around the beginning of 1982, “the terror started,” Ford says. “We knew something was happening, but we had no idea how widespread it was…and how devastating it would become.”
The good news: In 1983 the HIV virus was identified, and a screening test was quickly developed. The bad news: Screening tests revealed that AIDS was widespread.
“We were horrified,” says Fauci. “We had been dealing with only the tip of the iceberg. There were many, many, many-fold people who were infected who had not yet gotten clinically ill.”
After 50 minutes of clinical exhortation, Fauci turns to the problem of prevention— the single most divisive element of the AIDS era, during which a large percentage of Americans, including medical professionals, insisted on viewing AIDS as “the gay disease.”
Ironically, it was that inaccurate and hurtful label that kept many members of the gay community from trusting mainstream medicine as the crisis spread, according to Ford.
“The fact that they were talking about a ‘gay disease’ made no sense to me,” he says. “If you think a disease is going to confine itself to a particular group of people, I can’t trust what you’re doing.”
Long read. https://archive.ph/OBS3c#selection-5007.0-5011.203
"The gay disease" sounds familiar? It should. "Chinese Virus". "Kung Flu". "The Chinese disease". And so on.
At that moment 40 years ago, no one could have guessed they were witnessing the dawn of a worldwide outbreak that would infect more than 75 million people and kill some 35 million.
The first hint that something ominous was arising came in a little-noticed item in the June 5, 1981 edition of the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR): Five gay men in Los Angeles had been treated for pneumocystis pneumonia, a rare fungal infection of the lungs caused by a severely weakened immune system. Not mentioned in the report: Two of the men had already died. Another would soon succumb to the infection.
Then came a second MMWR report in early July. Now no fewer than 26 gay men—this time not only in LA, but also in New York and San Francisco—were suffering from both pneumocystis and Kaposi’s sarcoma, a lesion-causing cancer of the blood vessels, and other opportunistic infections.
“I got chills up and down my spine,” Fauci recalls. “I said to myself, ‘Oh, my God, this has to be a new disease.’”
“I kept going over it in my mind,” he says, “and the only conclusion I could come up with was that we were dealing with a brand new infection. It was likely a virus, because if it was a bacteria, we could probably see it. Viruses tend to be elusive.”
Fauci and his colleagues went with the tentative assumption that this new virus was zoonotic—originally transmitted from animals—because about 75 percent of all infections in humans start out that way. (Their assumption would prove correct.)
A month after that, on September 24, 1982, the CDC applied a name to the new disease: acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). In mid-December, CDC reported that infants in New York, New Jersey, and California were showing signs of AIDS. The growing number of cases in the gay community was particularly devastating.
Around the beginning of 1982, “the terror started,” Ford says. “We knew something was happening, but we had no idea how widespread it was…and how devastating it would become.”
The good news: In 1983 the HIV virus was identified, and a screening test was quickly developed. The bad news: Screening tests revealed that AIDS was widespread.
“We were horrified,” says Fauci. “We had been dealing with only the tip of the iceberg. There were many, many, many-fold people who were infected who had not yet gotten clinically ill.”
After 50 minutes of clinical exhortation, Fauci turns to the problem of prevention— the single most divisive element of the AIDS era, during which a large percentage of Americans, including medical professionals, insisted on viewing AIDS as “the gay disease.”
Ironically, it was that inaccurate and hurtful label that kept many members of the gay community from trusting mainstream medicine as the crisis spread, according to Ford.
“The fact that they were talking about a ‘gay disease’ made no sense to me,” he says. “If you think a disease is going to confine itself to a particular group of people, I can’t trust what you’re doing.”
Long read. https://archive.ph/OBS3c#selection-5007.0-5011.203
"The gay disease" sounds familiar? It should. "Chinese Virus". "Kung Flu". "The Chinese disease". And so on.
