What happened to all the paranoia that was running rampant in the 1980s about AIDS - especially the ability to screen our blood supply. Was it all hype, or did we just grow complacent? (Maybe half and half?)
Screening times for donated blood has improved drastically. From 6 months to less than a week between exposure and detection.
Also, drugs and treatments that didn’t exist then.
In the US anyway, it’s mainly two big reasons as far as I can tell:
-
People are educated about AIDS. In the 80s, there was all sorts of panic and misunderstanding about how it was transmitted. Now, if you practice safe sex and don’t share hypodermic needles, you’re pretty well protected. All donated blood is now screened, etc…
-
They’ve gotten darn good at treating it if you have access to medication. In the 80s, testing positive for HIV was a death sentence…one carried out rather quickly in most cases. While still deadly, with proper treatment, the mortality rate has dropped considerably and people are now living decades with HIV without it progressing to full blown AIDS. Magic Johnson was diagnosed in 1991 and still hasn’t progressed into AIDS.
New adults diagnosed with HIV now have a life expectancy of 20 to 50 years after diagnosis…that wasn’t the case in the 80s.
HIV is not a death sentence any more. When the AIDS scare was going on, it was.
HIV was also, in the 1980’s, brand new. No one knew anything about it, just that people were dying. They were seeing symptoms without a cause.
It was also a political disease, with the whole gay and Haitian thing going on, so it got widely publicized.
In this case, it’s mostly knowledge that has let it relax as a huge frenzy now.
Not only was AIDS a death sentence, in the heyday of the scare, it was known to be a fairly horrible way to die. And that wasn’t all- it was a sexually transmitted disease (though you could catch it in other ways), so there was a stigma attached to it. There was a good chance that you would not only die horribly in fairly short order, but you might also be socially shunned or even abandoned by your friends and family.
Alive and well in Africa (2009 statistics).
Also, the anticipated “break out” of AIDS into the general population never happened.
Not only that, but at that time, the additional stigma came with the association with homosexuality. Remember that it was termed the “gay disease” in its early years. Now, the association with homosexuality has considerably less validity, as well as less stigma. Medicine changed, but so did society.
Parts of Africa today are what we feared with the AIDS situation in this country. That would have happened here as well if not for the development of anti-retroviral drugs and a general change in behavior. Basically we had a really effective campaign that helped to get more and more people to practice safe sex. Not to mention more people got tested and people with a diagnosis became mostly pretty responsible about taking steps to make sure they didn’t spread the disease.
Once it stopped spreading like wildfire here and we also found medical treatments to make it “treatable” instead of fatal the panic went away–but so did the genuine cause for panic.
However to some degree work still needs to be done. The annual number of new infections has been relatively stable for awhile (good, because that means it isn’t growing relative to population but shrinking, but bad that it isn’t going down) and the number of total people living with HIV has obviously been going up due to increased longevity and a continual rate of new infections.
What’s concerning is male-to-male infections have started going up again, something like 20% in some recent years. This is bad, because of the extreme AIDS scare in the gay community gays were the first Americans to start really taking serious prevention steps and practicing safe sex. There is a concern among many now that a younger generation of gay men who grew didn’t come of age until the 2000s, well removed from the AIDS “panic” don’t take it very seriously and are much less responsible on these matters.
It’s the same problem we’re seeing with the anti-vaccination movement. The generation that sees the first-hand effects of the disease takes it very seriously and works hard to wipe it out. Subsequent generations, having never seen the disease at its worst, blow it off - and then the disease comes back.
HIV is still out there, not everyone can access or afford HAART therapy, and the therapy may not work indefinitely. I wouldn’t rule out a resurgence of the 1980s AIDS panic at some point in the future (although I hope I’m wrong about this!)
Also, with the new treatments, AIDS/HIV is no longer seen as an inevitably fatal condition, so for a lot of younger gay men the urgency to take precautions is no longer there. It’s actually pretty maddening to watch happen if you were around even for the early-90s post-crisis era. I can’t imagine what it’s like for someone who was actually adult and living as an open gay man in the thick of it.
Yes, the cocktails can hold off the disease almost indefinitely.
At around $1,000/month per patient. Can’t imagine that would have any effect on Big Pharm/Big Med searching for a cure very diligently.
There was a (mildly homophobic?) joke around at the time, which I nevertheless thought was clever and humorous. I’ll put it in spoilers here:
What’s the hardest thing about having AIDS?Convincing your mother and father that you’re Haitian.
I have a gay friend who is living with HIV. He’s in his mid-60’s now. Back in the day (mid-1970’s), he invited me several times to sample the same-sex pleasures with him. (No, I wasn’t bothered or offended by that.) This was during the time that it was known that gay men were getting mysteriously fatally ill, but before anyone knew why.
He now tells me that he’s had HIV since way back when, in the early 1970’s or so. This surprises me. Who, in those days, got HIV/AIDS and lived long to tell about it?
Does he have AIDS, or is he just carrying the HIV virus? Those are two different things. And some people do have a natural immunity.
Superstition and religious pressure are difficult to combat. In some parts of Africa, men are convinced that having sex with a virgin will get rid of HIV. In countries with a heavy christian presence, there is pressure not to have protected sex and to produce as many babies as possible. Uganda made significant progress with condom distribution, and the incidence of new cases of HIV dropped; then it fell apart for various reasons. I had workers in Mali die from AIDS; an awful sight to see them in the final stages.
I also just want to add in the idea that there is a huge movement within the young gay culture to not “stigmatize” people who are HIV+ as being terrible people. I think that this is a good thing. However, in a way, it also may inadvertently lessen the negative connotations to being HIV+ and make young gay men not really care that much about it.
To reiterate I do not think it’s a good thing to think less of someone who is HIV+, to think that they deserved it somehow, etc. Just that this acceptance movement I see may make it seem like having HIV+ is no big deal at all, no different than being gay itself or being overweight or something like that, I’m not quite sure.
Also the high incidence and poor prognosis of sufferers in countries such as Ukraine show the effect of government mismanagement as well as cultural superstition.
Fortunately, there’s enough government funding coming in that it may yet happen, like with that infant recently. Besides, as resistance increases to the old drugs, there’ll be money in the new ones, so even the most cynical/CT-minded among us can still believe there’s hope in research!
It’s actually not all that easy to get, for the most part. The virus is extremely fragile.
In the early 1990s, Spin (a rock magazine) had a monthly column about AIDS, and one doctor said, “In 10 or 15 years, AIDS will mostly be a disease of drug addicts, and you won’t hear much about it.” I’m skeptical of any kind of futurist predictions, but in this case, at least in this country, he was right.
As for Third World AIDS, I personally believe that a lot of it is spread through the reuse of needles and other supplies.