36 Years Later: The Opportunity To End AIDS As We Know It

Thirty-six years ago today, if someone had told me that we would be on threshold of controlling the HIV/AIDS pandemic without a vaccine or a cure, I would not have believed it. But today we can realize that potential. And with the critical and essential progress we have made on HIV cure research and vaccine development, we are closer to eliminating HIV than ever before – binding communities, scientists, and political leaders together to envision a different future. On June 5, 1981, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the first cases of what would later become known as AIDS. Particularly for those of us who were young physicians at that time, nothing would ever be the same. In the years that followed, we witnessed the devastation and despair wrought by the epidemic among individuals, families, and communities in the United States. We watched hundreds and then thousands of men and women – many of them in the prime of their lives – die of AIDS-related causes. While most of these individuals knew their own days were numbered, they bravely and selflessly marched in the streets and fought on behalf of their friends to secure a response to the epidemic. Over the ensuing decades, thanks to a combination of scientific advances, political leadership, and community activism, the epidemic began to recede in the United States. Not long after, in the early 2000s, reports from the front lines of the epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa were dire. Entire ...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news