16 sett 1980 anni - HIV/AIDS

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HIV/AIDS:A deadly disease that killed nearly 100,000 people in the United States in the 1980s and to date has killed more than 30 million worldwide


Reagan’s complex legacy also includes the poor government response to one of the worst epidemics of the postwar decades. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a slow-acting but deadly pathogen, emerged in Africa when a chimpanzee virus jumped to humans; immigrants carried it to Haiti and then to the United States during the 1970s. In 1981, American physicians identified HIV as a new virus — one that eventually led to a disease called acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). By the early 1980s, hundreds of gay men, who were prominent among the earliest carriers of the virus, were dying from AIDS and related conditions. HIV/AIDS spread worldwide, and by the end of the twentieth century the fast-spreading virus was carried by more than 40 million people of both sexes. To date, the virus has killed more than 30 million people around the globe.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic struck the United States in the early 1980s and has remained a major public health issue ever since. The Reagan administration’s slow and ineffectual response to the crisis led gay rights activists to found ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in 1987, which engaged in militant protests designed to force the federal government to increase support for research and care. In the 1994 New York City Gay Pride parade pictured here, ACT UP supporters hold aloft posters with the ACT UP slogan “Silence = Death.”


Within the United States, AIDS took nearly one hundred thousand lives in the 1980s — more than the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined. However, because its most visible early victims were gay men, President Reagan, emboldened by New Right conservatives, hesitated in declaring a national health emergency. Some presidential advisors even asserted that this “gay disease” might be a divine retribution against homosexuals. Between 1981 and 1986, as the epidemic spread, the Reagan administration took little action, and blocked the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, from speaking forthrightly to the nation about the disease. Late in Reagan’s second term, under pressure from gay activists and health officials, the administration finally began to devote federal resources to treatment and research. Their delay came at the expense of human lives.

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