Island Voices
AIDS: 20 years and counting
Paul Groesbeck is the executive director of the Life Foundation, Hawai'i's first AIDS organization.
On June 5, 1981, a small article in a government publication described the cases of five young gay men who all had a rare form of pneumonia. That article is considered to be the first formal notice of what soon came to be called AIDS.
It was early in the Reagan administration and just a few years after the Vietnam War. We were all tired of complicated politics and longed for a little clear sailing.
As the cases cited on June 5 were quietly joined by hundreds more, the new administration largely ignored the signs of an impending epidemic. At least that's the way we remember it.
Due in large part, I am sure, to homophobia in our society, the people in power did not do enough to mount an early and aggressive prevention campaign. As a result, even before it had a name, the virus that led to AIDS had firmly established itself.
Consequently, the early responses to AIDS were grass-roots efforts emerging from the gay community. These included support groups, informational hot lines and countless public presentations alerting people to the threat of HIV while debunking inaccurate rumors that were fueled by fear, ignorance and intolerance.
In those 20 years, 450,000 Americans have been lost to AIDS, 1,500 in Hawai'i, and 900,000 are currently infected with HIV. Each year, 40,000 more people in the United States become HIV-positive, an annual figure that has stabilized but not declined.
There is some good news. The Reagan administration, followed by Bush, Clinton and Bush again, eventually appropriated billions of dollars for HIV prevention, care and research. In 1996, new classes of AIDS drugs became widely available and the death toll due to AIDS fell from 50,000 in 1995 to 16,000 last year.
As things have improved a bit in the wealthy nations, the global news today almost defies comprehension. More than 36 million people are infected with HIV, and each day 14,500 additional people become infected.
Last year, 3 million people died as a result of AIDS, 2.4 million in southern Africa and 470,000 in southern and Southeast Asia. Since the body count began 20 years ago, an astonishing 22 million people, 4 million of them children, have been lost to AIDS. There are now more than 13 million children who bear the label "AIDS orphans."
Meanwhile, back in the wealthy countries, much is made of the declining death rate and the availability of lifesaving drugs. We should couple those facts, however, with a few others. There is still neither a cure nor a preventative vaccine. Many people taking AIDS drugs experience debilitating side effects and many others do not respond to the drugs at all. The question without an answer remains, "How long will these drugs work?"
For HIV-positive people in Hawai'i and the United States, the most certain thing is uncertainty. For people in Africa and other poor regions, there is, sadly, little uncertainty. The situation is bad and getting worse. The dictionary is powerless to produce a word sufficient to describe a raging pandemic.
So, where do we find ourselves on this inauspicious anniversary? We are already hearing the term. "third decade of AIDS," as if 10 additional years of this nightmare are already guaranteed. But they're probably right. AIDS is not over. At best, we have seen the end of the beginning.
There is still so much work that can and should be done by nations and by individuals to halt the further spread of this dreadful disease and to help HIV-positive people survive. We should all wake up tomorrow and rededicate ourselves to those efforts.
But today, as so many people around the world reflect on those 20 years, perhaps the best thing we can do is to stop for a minute and remember the dead, all 22 million of them.
