AIDS at 25

25 Years of AIDS - Reflecting Back and Looking Forward might have been called the Faces of AIDS. Youth, health ministers, scientists and activists were all represented, each with their unique perspective on the evolution of the pandemic over the last quarter century. (Transcript available here courtesy of the Kaiser Network.)

(The photo above is when Anthony Fauci, director of the National Insitutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease at the NIH, stood to address the crowd. Protesters mobbed him, chanting: "Tony, tell George the evidence can't be ignored" and "Condoms, needles and the rest, we need more than just a test." Fauci, just stood there, and let them have their say before he began his talk.)

Midway into a long week and with the threat of fatigue setting in Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the Lancet, took a different tact when he turned to question the panel.

"Gregg, while you were speaking, you didn't know that we were taking a poll in the audience. And even though you've moved to South Africa, we've just elected you president of the United States. You take over office tomorrow morning. What are you going to do about HIV/AIDS?"

Obviously shocked by his recent election to the White House (especially because he lives in South Africa), Gregg Gonsalves, the coordinator of the regional treatment literacy and advocacy program at the AIDS and Rights Alliance of Southern Africa, hesitated and then continued:

"Really? Look, we can first start with making needle exchange legal and federally funded. We can get rid of abstinence-only sex education programs. We know they don't work.

We can have national health care. The rest of the industrialized world has national health care. We have none of it. Now I'm living in South Africa but in the U.S., we have a country that is destroying what we set up under the New Deal and the Great Society programs and throwing the poor to the wolves. And basically, if I was president we would have national health care and we'd have evidence-based HIV prevention policies that would do a start to controlling the AIDS epidemic.

Then we have to address violence against women, epidemics of drug use, and other things I described in my talk. But that's not the way my country sees fit to deal with people living with AIDS or other people dealing with infectious and chronic diseases."