Posted on June 06, 2016
Source: https://www.statnews.com/2016/06/06/aids-free-generation/
T
"Thirty-five years ago this week, our lives — and the lives of millions of people around the globe — changed forever with the publication of a report of five previously healthy gay men in Los Angeles diagnosed with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a disease typically seen only in those with profoundly impaired immune function.
As two physicians — one immersed in his career as a physician-scientist in infectious diseases and immunology at the National Institutes of Health, the other just starting her career as a fellow in internal medicine and immunology at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center — we encountered the earliest days of what eventually would become the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
We were trained to be healers, but during those early days of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, we experienced the heartbreaking frustration of trying to help patients infected with the human immunodeficiency virus whom we could not heal. With time, however, came the incremental and ultimately transforming scientific advances that moved an HIV diagnosis from an almost inevitable death sentence to a chronic, often manageable disease. In the 1980s, a person infected with HIV often lived less than a year after it progressed to AIDS. Today, combination antiretroviral therapy offers individuals with HIV nearly normal lifespans if they start treatment early and are able to adhere to their therapy."
