World AIDS Day: The Beginning of the End

A look at where we are in the fight on World AIDS Day:

The Tipping Point (Yahoo)

"We've passed the tipping point in the AIDS fight at the global level, but not all countries are there yet, and the gains made can easily stall or unravel," said Erin Hohlfelder, ONE's director of global health policy.

"The number of people newly infected with HIV over the last year was lower than the number of HIV-positive people who joined those getting access to the medicines they need to take for life to keep AIDS at bay."

A Vaccine on the Way? (CNN)

A trial in Thailand that had 16,000 participants and used 2 previously studied vaccines aimed at stopping HIV infection may prove to be the answer, in much the same way as the cocktail of medications changed the HIV world in the late 1990s.

"Two previously developed vaccines, known as ALVAC-HIV and AIDSVAX, were used in combination, with the first priming an immune response against HIV and the second used as a booster once the immunity waned. The duo reduced the risk of contracting HIV by 31.2% -- a modest reduction, but it was a start."  

"When creating vaccines, the desired level of protection is usually 80% to 90%. But the high burden of HIV and potentially beneficial impact of lower levels of protection warrant licensing at a lower percentage... Over 50% is worth licensing from a public health perspective," Koff said, meaning that despite less shielding from any contact with the HIV virus, even a partially effective vaccine would save many lives over time."

33 years ago today

In the June 5 1981 issue of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a rare form of pneumonia in five gay men

Michael Gottlieb, MD, a physician and immunologist,  was the lead author of this first public account identifying AIDS, and the date is now regarded as the beginning of the epidemic. 

In his words, Gottlieb said:

In January 1981, I was asked to see a patient for an immunology consultation in my Los Angeles practice. He was a 31-year-old gay man with a fever and weight loss. He also turned out to have Pneumocystis pneumonia. He had almost no CD4 cells. I’d never seen anything like his case before.
Word trickled out into the medical community that I was seeing this patient. Colleagues referred three more patients who were essentially carbon copies. Now we had four men and were convinced that this was something that would become more common.
We contacted the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, who advised talking to the CDC. The individual assigned from the CDC to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health was unaware of anything unusual in the local gay male population. He checked with the CDC, and they were not aware of anything nationally.
At that point they invited us to write the MMWR report, which was titled “Pneumocystis Pneumonia—Los Angeles.” Doctors all over the country started telling me about additional cases and asking for advice about how to manage them..

AIDS enters the lexicon in 1982...

In 1983, Pasteur Institute researchers Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi isolate a virus from the swollen lymph gland of an AIDS patient. They called it lymphadenopathy-associated virus or LAV. (In 2008, the Nobel Prize in Medicine recognizes this huge achievement)

In 1985, the first HIV test licensed; blood banks begin screening donations.

By 1986, everybody agrees to call the virus HIV: human immunodeficiency virus.

As time passed, treatments developed so that the killer disease had real care options, but make no mistake-  HIV/AIDS is the epidemic of my lifetime... the plague that still infects and kills.

Learn more about the history of HIV/AIDS. Learn how to protect yourself... 


Timeline info

World AIDS Day

French scientist Francoise Barre-Sinoussi with her colleague Luc Montagnier  identifyied HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, a plague that has killed about 35 million people since the 1980's. This made testing possible for the first time.

They received the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

And their discovery has led to treatments and improvements in the HIV+ world.

I, for one, am grateful!

So for today, I am thankful for:

1) Francoise Barre-Sinoussi
2) Luc Montagnier 
3) David Ho for protease inhibitors
4) Ryan White
5) The CDC, doctors and researchers who have been fighting the good fight for decades.