After 30 years, the AIDS war still rages

I cannot believe that it has been 30 years since we first heard of AIDS. It is unfortunate that it took this country so long to recognize that AIDS was a serious disease and that we could do something about it. I hope in the next 30 years a cure will be found that everyone can afford. We can do more domestically and globally to ensure that the right information is given out as it relates to AIDS/HIV. People should not still think that this is a white, gay male disease.

Thirty years ago Sunday, a brief report in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report described cases of a rare form of pneumonia called Pneumocystis carinii in five young Los Angeles men, "all active homosexuals." The cases were noteworthy because the men had previously been healthy, though their particular pneumonia had only been seen in people with severely depressed immune systems.

Within a month, a second report had identified 54 young gay men with a rare cancer known as Kaposi's sarcoma, another disease that had been almost unknown in young men. And by the following summer, the mysterious disease underlying these reports had a name: acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.

AIDS was a murderous, mysterious delinquent that emerged seemingly out of nowhere. Transmitted primarily through sexual activity and blood, it mowed down whole communities of young gay men, tore through a generation of intravenous drug users and made orphans of millions of the world's children.

In the 30 years since its first recognition, AIDS has killed nearly 30 million people worldwide, including more than 615,000 in the United States. Today, an additional 34 million people — including nearly 1.2 million in the U.S. — are living with the virus that causes the disease, human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. This year, 1.8 million of them will die, including about 17,000 in this country.

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