SPECIAL REPORT -- NewsWeek 06.11.01
The plague that's killed 22 million isn't done with us yet. While we hunt for a vaccine, people continue to die -- from AIDS or the drugs intended to treat it. BY SHARON BEGLEY

AIDS At Twenty

On June 5, 1981 the federal Centers for Disease Control issued its weekly newsletter on outbreaks of illness and unusual deaths in the United States. Two tourists returning from the French West Indies had come down with dengue fever, reported one story. An additional 6,707 children were diagnosed with lead poisoning. And in a 553-word article, doctors reported that a rare parasitic lung infection, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, had shown up in Los Angeles. It had struck “5 young men, all active homosexuals.” Three out of three tested had an inexplicable depression of their immune function.

AND SO IT BEGAN.
How do you mark 20 years of AIDS? With mourning, surely, for the 22 million lives from San Francisco to Nairobi that acquired immune deficiency syndrome has stolen: Ryan White, Rock Hudson, Arthur Ashe, Alvin Ailey, Rudolf Nureyev, Randy Shilts, Elizabeth Glaser, Keith Haring, Liberace and all the emaciated, sunken-eyed nameless victims. And you mark it, too, with horror that last year 5.3 million people worldwide—14,500 a day—were newly infected. In the developed world, you probably also mark 20 years of AIDS with a sense of hope that the carnage of the early plague years may be behind us, thanks to drugs that have turned AIDS into a chronic disease that you live with rather than die of, at least for a while: after all, advertisements for the medications show young, buff HIV-positive men climbing mountains. And maybe you also commemorate June 5 with a trace of smugness. We closed bathhouses, sent every U.S. household a pamphlet called “Understanding AIDS” and preached safe sex, with the result that, in the United States, new HIV infections peaked at 150,000 a year in the mid-1980s and then plunged to 40,000 in every year of the 1990s. When 1997 brought the first report of a decline in AIDS deaths in America... well, we thought the worst was over.

click to read: AIDS: a 20 Year View>>

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