It Hasn't Gone Away
By BOB HERBERT
It was then, almost exactly 20 years ago, that the first hint of a
serious problem was detected. On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention published an article in its Morbidity and Mortality
Weekly Report that began as follows: "In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active
homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii
pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the
patients died." A month later, on July 3, The New York Times "Doctors in New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men
41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer. Eight of the
victims died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made. "The cause of the outbreak is unknown, and there is as yet no evidence
of contagion. But the doctors who have made the diagnoses, mostly in New
York City and the San Francisco Bay Area, are alerting other physicians
who treat large numbers of homosexual men to the problem in an effort to
help identify more cases and to reduce the delay in offering chemotherapy
treatment." The cancer was Kaposi's sarcoma. AIDS was upon us, and the progression
of the disease from that early mystifying period would be swift and
horrible. But the reaction to the disease, both in the United States and
elsewhere, was tragically slow. Ronald Reagan's biographer, Lou Cannon, wrote: "Reagan's response to
this epidemic was halting and ineffective. In the critical years of 1984
and 1985, according to his White House physician, Brigadier General John
Hutton, Reagan thought of AIDS as though 'it was measles and it would go
away.' " By the end of 1988, nearly 90,000 Americans had been diagnosed with
AIDS and nearly 50,000 had died. By the mid-90's, the peak of the epidemic
in the U.S., more than half a million Americans had been diagnosed with
AIDS, and more than half of them had died. Elsewhere the news has been worse. What is happening in Africa is
beyond hideous, maybe even beyond comprehension. According to the World
Health Organization, more than 25 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are
infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, H.I.V., and AIDS. More
than 12 million African children have been orphaned by AIDS. Nearly four
million Africans were infected with H.I.V. last year. Worldwide, more than 36 million people are infected with the AIDS
virus, and in some places much, much worse is yet to come. Twenty years after the first scientific paper on the disease we now
call AIDS, the world is still not ready to properly fight the epidemic
that has already killed more than 23 million people and will soon surpass
the lethal toll of the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages. The countries that have been hit hardest by the disease do not, in many
cases, have the money, the medical resources or the sociopolitical
infrastructure necessary to fight the disease. (In much of Africa it is
still taboo to even talk about AIDS.) And there is no real plan among the
wealthier nations to fight AIDS globally. In the U.S., where AIDS deaths have been reduced dramatically by the
use of protease inhibitors and other drugs, a dangerous sense of
complacency seems to have settled in. But there are 40,000 new cases of
H.I.V. infection each year, and no one knows, really, how long individuals
taking the drugs can survive, or whether the virus will mutate, or become
resistant to the drugs. Twenty years later the epidemic is still with us. There is no cure.
There is no vaccine. And in a world as interconnected as ours has become,
there is no cause for complacency. 
he scourge came
upon us rather quietly. In the late spring of 1981 a new president, Ronald
Reagan, was rounding up votes for his tax-cut package. Americans were
fascinated by Prince Charles's fairy-tale courtship of Lady Diana Spencer,
who was routinely referred to as the next queen of England. Al Pacino was
starring in David Mamet's "American Buffalo" at the Circle in the Square.
And an enormous ad campaign was touting a new movie from the creators of
"Jaws" and "Star Wars," an old-fashioned cliffhanger called "Raiders of
the Lost Ark."
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