from WTF to talk of a cure in 30-ish years

Today I wrote a long post about HIV for my Global Heath class. I'm reposting it here because the links I found are great. I realized that one of the reasons why looking at the timeline of this disease is so interesting to me is that we are almost the same age--my life has run its course alongside much of the lifetime of HIV and it's amazing to me to see how this disease has progressed in our shared lifetime. 

My post was in response to a classmate of mine's posting of this article from The Telegrah that talks about the possibility of a cure in the next few years and already this year we've seen several stories in the news about a baby being "cured" and other people who's viral load is so low it's virtually non-existent. We've come along way fast. My health post is below.

It's amazing to me the medical and social progress that has happened around HIV since the early 1980s. 

In the 1990s, I was pretty heavily involved in an HIV/AIDS youth peer education program that the American Red Cross was piloting in a few areas around the country. Unfortunately, it never took off nationally, but I personally thought it was a great and effective preventative intervention. 

I was teaching not long after Magic Johnson announced that he was HIV positive and had directed a ton of his personal wealth to HIV research/education. Around that time, the HIV phenomenon was just coming out of the really, really dark days of the late 1980s and early 1990s when institutional and general public lack of knowledge and understanding about the biology of the disease as well as the social implications of the disease left everyone of a certain age or of various social groups feeling unanchored and that the act of loving someone or being lazy about condoms could mean death or severe illness. 

This was when the entertainment industry was maybe the most human I've seen it be in my lifetime and I'd highly recommend watching these movies and tv shows if you have time (like over the summer) to get a sense of how far we've come both medically and culturally in the discussion around HIV. It will be interesting to see how HIV as a disease is treated and how people who are HIV positive are treated in this country today versus how these were addressed in the 1980s and 1990s, and how addressed in other, developing countries, with different social and development contexts.

1. And The Band Played On -- HBO film about the early days of HIV and the social and medical responses to the disease. This was the first film I ever saw about HIV and it's heartbreaking and eye-opening. Watch the full film here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIHy4_31Db4
2. MTV's Real World: San Francisco (the first time) -- Pedro Zamora was the first openly HIV positive gay man to be featured on national television. The Real World television reality show was a totally different animal in its early days compared to what it turned into in its later years and Pedro and his story is one of the reasons why. I was talking to Sarah about Pedro's story a few weeks ago and it made me choke up just thinking about how important he was in changing a generation's perceptions of people with HIV specifically and maybe even people's empathy toward other diseases, racial or socio-economic differences, etc. (to relate it to today's lab). The entire season is available for viewing here: http://www.mtv.com/shows/realworld-season3/video.jhtml (ps there's also lots of other crazy, more typical "Real World" stuff that makes the show fun for summer viewing [esp. crazy Puck]... and, hello, the clothes! It was the '90s!!!). He was 22 when he died shortly after the final episode aired in 1994. MTV put together a tribute to Pedro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA4ZZImS4Qs.
3. Philadephia -- Probably the most famous of the HIV-story offerings. Tom Hanks won an Oscar for his performance in this film as an HIV positive man and watching the process that Denzel Washington's character (as Hanks' lawyer) goes through in terms of his personal beliefs about homosexuality, HIV, human rights, etc., is powerful. 

In the 1980s, it seemed like HIV was as contagious and deadly as ebola, so many people were dying. Then they figured out ARV therapy, but it was expensive.

In the 1990s, it seemed like affordable, accessible treatment would never arrive. Then it did and people across the developed and developing world were able to live with some measure of disease management, but it still seemed like an incurable disease--after all, illnesses that had been around for much longer and that are politically less sensitive still didn't have cures, why should HIV be any different?

In the 2000s, we've seen the costs and unwieldy aspect of HIV meds decrease considerably and in 2013 there has been a lot of talk around cures and vaccines--even if we're still 5+ years out from a "cure," it's still incredible to me the medical and social changes we've seen around this disease. Although it seems like a long time since HIV came on the scene, the character of the (medical/social) treatment around it has progressed, in my opinion, very quickly considering that we've seen significant changes/advances across countries and cultures in HIV-related personal behavior, personal perceptions, research, medicine, patient-doctor communication, education, etc.