Warrior of AIDS Pandemic Looks Back 20 Years
It's estimated that 1 million Americans are infected with the virus that causes AIDS. Only 20 years ago next Tuesday, the government reported on the first five deaths from this still-mysterious disease. The pandemic's terrible beginnings and continuing battle through the eyes of one warrior is the focus of tonight's Weekend Journal.
"Those were the dark ages. Those were the saddest, most poignant, difficult times--comparing them to now," says Dr. Donna Mildvan at Beth Israel Medical Center in Boston. "This is the modern era. Light has been shed. We know the name of the bug. We know how to target it--and we know it's molecular biology."
By 1981, Mildvan had seen five healthy young gay men die within weeks from rare diseases. For Mildvan and her colleagues, the deaths of those five men's cases would forever change their lives.
"We had no idea of the monumental proportions because at that point it appeared to be confined to a subgroup of very highly sexually active gay men," says Mildvan. "At that point, it wasn't clear that it was an infection at all. It might have been, but that was [one of] the many things on the list."
It would take another year before the cause got an official name: AIDS. And yet another 2 years before the discovery of the virus that came to be called HIV. Hospital beds were filling with dying patients. The annual death rate soared until the introduction of new medicine in 1995. Even so, 450,000 Americans have died from AIDS-related illness. More than the number of soldiers that died in Vietnam, in World War II, and World War I combined.
"[There is] nothing worse than knowing that when somebody walks in the door that they are going to die but you don't why," says Mildvan.
Safe-sex campaigns cut the new infection rates from a peak of 150,000 cases each year in the 1980s to 40,000 cases per year in the last decade. But this week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that the rate among gay men has started to increase to the level it was in the 80s.
"So safe-sex practices have really not been uniformly adhered to and every new case and every new case that I see is a failure," says Mildvan.
Some blame the effectiveness of the AIDS cocktails that have turned AIDS from a death sentence to a chronic disease.
"Taking life-long drugs is not an easy [decision] one to make, and the[re are] complications and the side effects and some long-term side effects that we don't even know about yet," says Mildvan. "Fortunately people are living 10, 20 years after we begin treatment, but we don't know what kinds of complications that we are going to run into by virtue of these long-term treatment regiments. So it's better not to get infected."
Mildvan describes HIV as a formidable, ever-mutating army. One that she believes can be beaten, but maybe not in her lifetime. "It's a complicated foe," says Mildvan. "It's a clever one, and it may be for the net generation of people to figure it out."
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