Hillary Clinton Announces New AIDS Initiatives

[Guest fountainhall]

Hillary Clinton has held out the prospect of “an AIDS free generation”, according to The Guardian this morning. Even though the HIV virus may be around for some time, science has shown that AIS can be defeated, she added. And Ellen de Generis has been appointed as a special envoy to raise awareness of the disease.

 

Three tools, used in combination, could turn the tide: preventing babies from being infected at birth; voluntary male circumcision, which reduces female to male transmission of the virus by 60%; and anti-retroviral drug treatment, which recent studies have shown not only keep those with HIV alive but reduces the risk of transmitting the infection to their partner by 96%.

 

Clinton pledged new money for pilot schemes in regions of sub-Saharan Africa where programmes on all these three fronts can be implemented and progress measured. In addition to $50m (£31m) that the US has already given to academic institutions for preparatory work, the government would put $60m more into Pepfar, the president's emergency plan for Aids relief, for a rapid expansion. "I want to challenge other donors to join us in this effort," she said.

 

Clinton also courted popular opinion by announcing a new special envoy to raise global awareness of the disease – the actress, comedian and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. Clinton said the actress would "bring her sharp wit and big heart, and her impressive TV audience and 8 million followers on Twitter" to the cause.

Whilst the additional funds will be welcomed, the controversial emphasis on male circumcision will no doubt spark a lot more heated debate. However, it is the next part of the article which I find the most contentious.

 

The US had been at the forefront of the fight against Aids over the last three decades, since the first cases of a mysterious disease were recorded there in 1981, she said. "I want the American people to understand the irreplaceable role the US has played in the fight against HIV/Aids.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/08/aids-free-generation-possible-clinton

 

That statement is just plain wrong! Yes, since the late 1980s the US has become involved in the fight against HIV AIDS. But there are many who suggest that if it had become involved years earlier, as so many in its own medical community begged it to do, then perhaps - just perhaps – there might have been a cure found before now. But the Reagan administration’s stubborn conservative agenda prevented it from acknowledging the importance of what was at first called the “gay plague”. It even condemned its own Surgeon-General, C. Everett Koop, when he mailed every household in the US about the dangers of the disease, how it was spread by sexual intercourse and the importance of condom use. Even gays at the time were outraged at his targeting gay sex.

 

It was only after the death or actor Rock Hudson, a personal friend of the Reagans, in 1985 that the President finally began to focus on the disease. Yet, he did not speak publicly about it for another two years. By then, over 20,000 Americans had died and it had spread to more than 100 countries. So we have to ask: where might we now be if the US had actually started funding research several years earlier when the first deaths became linked to sex and then to tainted blood?

[Guest thaiworthy]

That statement is just plain wrong! Yes, since the late 1980s the US has become involved in the fight against HIV AIDS. But there are many who suggest that if it had become involved years earlier, as so many in its own medical community begged it to do, then perhaps - just perhaps – there might have been a cure found before now. But the Reagan administration’s stubborn conservative agenda prevented it from acknowledging the importance of what was at first called the “gay plague”. It even condemned its own Surgeon-General, C. Everett Koop, when he mailed every household in the US about the dangers of the disease, how it was spread by sexual intercourse and the importance of condom use. Even gays at the time were outraged at his targeting gay sex.

 

It was only after the death or actor Rock Hudson, a personal friend of the Reagans, in 1985 that the President finally began to focus on the disease. Yet, he did not speak publicly about it for another two years. By then, over 20,000 Americans had died and it had spread to more than 100 countries. So we have to ask: where might we now be if the US had actually started funding research several years earlier when the first deaths became linked to sex and then to tainted blood?

This was very enlightening. I did not know all this. Thank you, Fountainhall. Clears up a lot of issues that I wondered about for some time. Here is another conspiracy theory that certainly seems accurate, straightforward and logical all at the same time. You certainly know your stuff!

[Bob]

So we have to ask: where might we now be if the US had actually started funding research several years earlier when the first deaths became linked to sex and then to tainted blood?

 

I understand the intellectual question posed but, with all due respect, I reject the underlying tone there.

 

Before attempting to answer something impossible to answer, perhaps someone might first tell us if the effort and money spent by England to research and combat HIV/aids around the world has been even 1/100th of the US effort? Or didn't they know about the problem across the pond?

[Guest fountainhall]

Before attempting to answer something impossible to answer, perhaps someone might first tell us if the effort and money spent by England to research and combat HIV/aids around the world has been even 1/100th of the US effort?

I fully understand Bob’s view. But please remember that I was referring specifically not to funding during the last 30 + years (when the US funding contribution has been prodigious), but only to the period up to Reagan's speech in 1987. Prior to that time, it is clear that –

 

i. HIV first appeared in groups of people in the USA in 1980;

 

ii. when, some 18 months later, the US government became aware of the seriousness of the disease and was asked by the Center for Disease Control for more funding, this was not provided;

 

iii. as more and more people died and it spread from the gay community into the general population at an alarming rate, the government still refused to funding requests from the CDC and the mayors of the cities most affected.

 

The history of the outbreak of HIV in humans is pretty well documented, and in discussing governments’ funding, the timeline is important. The medical community first became aware of a new disease that appeared at first to strike small clusters of gay men in San Francisco in June 1980 and then in New York in August of the same year. Prior to that there had been a handful of seemingly isolated cases, notably in Zaire and Denmark, of an unknown disease the cause of which baffled doctors.

 

As the disease spread, it took on various forms, again baffling doctors. At one point in August 1981, an eminent epidemiologist who had worked with the gay community on the development of a hepatitis vaccine, Dr. Don Francis, described the new disease to a colleague, Myron Essex. “This is feline leukaemia,” said Essex. Such was the confusion and the hope that there was some sort of simple answer back in those very early days. But the fact was that virtually all the patients until then were gay. So it came to be known, unfortunately, as the “gay plague” or “gay cancer” – the latter referring to the skin cancer known as Kaposi’s syndrome, although the disease also revealed other unrelated symptoms.

 

Two months earlier, the CDC in Atlanta published its first report about the disease. Sensitive to the feelings of the gay community, the report made no specific reference to homosexuality. By then, the general feeling was they were dealing with a new virus - not something related to poppers, an earlier thought – a virus that worked on suppressing the body’s immune system. By January 1982, doctors were noticing that similar symptoms were appearing in haemophiliac patients who had received blood transfusions. Over time, Factor VIII, a substance that helps blood clot naturally, was thought to be the ‘guilty’ agent. The realisation that this could assist the spread of the disease to the general population rang all sorts of alarm bells.

 

The CDC had understandably kept the US government’s Department of Health and Human Services informed of the growing crisis. The CDC itself did not have nearly enough funding to correlate all the information that was by now flooding in and to devote to research. So that same month, January 1982, Assistant Secretary for Health, Dr. Edwards Brandt, wrote to several other better-funded agencies asking them to pick up some of the work. None agreed to do so! Even funds promised earlier by the National Cancer Institute never appeared. That same month, Dr. Marcus Conant, a dermatologist at the University of California in San Francisco, realised that they had an epidemic on their hands. He knew full well that time is the enemy of any epidemic. “This disease is moving even if the government isn’t.”

 

By May 1983, everyone in the government was well aware of the disease, but had elected not to speak out. Even the most hard-line conservatives avoided the subject. Until May 24th, that is. On that day, the conservative speechwriter to disgraced former President Richard Nixon, Patrick Buchanan, wrote his first rambling, inconsistent newspaper column about AIDS.

 

The sexual revolution has begun to devour its children. And among the revolutionary vanguard, the Gay Rights activists, the mortality rate is highest and climbing . . . The poor homosexuals – they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting its awful retribution.

Two months later, the government was forced to respond to a request from the mayors of the cities most affected by AIDS. They wanted US$50 million in new federal AIDS research money. They also wanted the President to sign the bill for US$12 million already passed by the House. Secretary for Health, Margaret Heckler, then made the government’s first speech on the subject. “Nothing I will say is more important than this: that the Department of Health and Human Services considers AIDS its number-one health priority.” Despite this, none of the requested funding was provided!

 

But Bob referred to the UK’s efforts in relation to those of the US. Let’s summarise the situation in the US to this point.

 

In spite of knowledge that there had been an outbreak of a new epidemic, by January 1982 the US government refused both to accept that fact and to provide additional funding requested by the CDC. In June 1983, it turned down the mayors’ request for US$50 million. By that month, 644 Americans were dead and another 997 were infected. By December 1983, those numbers had doubled. Even as they doubled again, and again, and again, the US government continued to shilly-shally, urging the CDC to obtain funding from other research bodies, the very ones who had refused similar requests some years earlier. By end-1984, the total number of deaths was 3,655.

 

President Reagan’s first major speech was on 1 April 1987 when he addressed the US College of Physicians. He advocated a modest federal role in AIDS education – “as long as they teach that one of the answers to it is abstinence.”

 

That is all fact!

 

What about the UK? Also fact is that one of the first known fatalities of the new disease in the UK was Terence Higgins. But this was in July 1982, two years after the first case in the US. By mid-1984, the number of people diagnosed with AIDS had reached 100. It is hard to obtain UK statistics prior to 1984, but the total number of deaths by the end of 1984 was estimated at 89 (less than 3% of the US total).

 

In 1985, the UK government under Margret Thatcher, President Reagan’s conservative soul mate, did commence funding for research (unfortunately I cannot find anywhere on the internet any details of the amount of funding), as well as for a major pubic awareness advertising campaign. The latter was aired in March 1986 with the slogan “Don’t Aid AIDS.” At the beginning of 1987, every household received a leaflet and another public awareness campaign started, this time with the slogan, “AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance. Anyone can get it, gay or straight, male or female.” And when Reagan was making his speech about “modest funding”, Britain’s Princess Diana made a high profile media visit to AIDS patients and shook hands without wearing gloves.

 

It seems pretty clear to me that up to that point, despite a much later start, the UK government was doing more to spread awareness and tackle HIV AIDS than was the US government.

 

Summary

 

I agree my original question is impossible to answer. But it definitely is possible to draw conclusions. I believe it is very clear that up to early 1987, the US government was perfectly well aware it was dealing with a new epidemic that was killing very large numbers of its population, but because of the gay “nature” of the disease and its own hard-line conservative political base, it deliberately chose to do precious little. So the point I was trying to make is that the world lost several valuable years of research purely because of a conservative political agenda. By the time it finally started to do something, the cat was well and truly out of the bag. Could it have been caught with earlier funding? Nobody can know. But it has to be a possibility.

 

Source for statistics -

Several from the book: And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts

Others from -

http://www.avert.org/aids-history-86.htm

http://www.avert.org/aids-history87-92.htm

http://www.avert.org/uk-race-age-gender.htm