Thirty years of AIDS, an incurable disease that shook the world

Written by Sandeep Nehra

AIDS, an incurable disease appeared 30 years ago and which has some 30 million dead, shocked the world, sparking a financial effort exemplary mobilization at all levels and dramatic medical advances. AIDS appeared on June 5, 1981, 30 years ago.

That day, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta reported, in five young homosexual men in California, a rare pneumonia that struck until that severely immunocompromised.

A month later, a skin cancer is very rare diagnosed in 26 homosexual Americans. This is called “gay cancer.” The disease is named the following year the name of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS.

In 1983 a French team will isolate the virus, transmitted by blood, vaginal secretions, breast milk or semen, which attacks the immune system and exposes the “opportunistic infections” such as tuberculosis or pneumonia.

These 30 years of AIDS, punctuated by millions of deaths, broken families, children of African orphans, stigma is rampant, have also been hit by a virus against elusive. In 1996, the advent of HAART has changed that, inevitably fatal disease, AIDS became a chronic disease.

The Global Fund, created in 2002, poured in eight years nearly 22 billion dollars in subsidies. The United States set up an “emergency program” PEPFAR. The Gates Foundation spends a lot of money to the disease.

“AIDS has changed the world, a new social bond has developed between countries north and south, which never happened for any other disease,” said Michel Sidibe, director of UNAIDS.

Patients homosexuals also participate in the fight in their own way. They become “expert patients” tell their stories to the specialists of the disease, trace requirements, talk about side effects of treatments, “says Bruno Spire, who chairs the association aids.

But as the disease kills more but does not cure, the number of infected people is increasing and there is always more research, more treatment, more money.

Ultimately, only one in three people who need treatment benefits. Worse, for two people entering treatment, five are newly infected. Therefore focusing efforts on prevention.

“We need a revolution of prevention, because it is impossible to imagine that out of the epidemic through treatment and even that can treat all those in need,” said Seth Berkley, who heads the NGO IAVI.

New strategies are emerging: circumcision, which protects up to two out of three men, a microbicide gel, which looks promising for women starting treatment for the sick, which reduced to almost nothing the risk of sexual transmission .. .

But the initial effects are slow to come, and 30 years after its debut, despite the mobilization and the absence of a vaccine, AIDS is far from defeated. Besides, according to the Global Fund, the funding planned for the coming years are clearly short of requirements and make “unable to perform some basic interventions.

In addition to the two-thirds of HIV infected people worldwide do not know they are and spread disease. In France there are about 50,000. A survey conducted in bars, saunas and backrooms of gay Paris estimated that nearly 18% contamination of clients, including 20% ??who do not know.

It is true that AIDS is still not a disease like any other and we often prefer not to know. “It’s always difficult to say that 30 years ago, it remains tainted the image of stigma, which discourages nor to speak or to get tested,” notes Bruno Spire, himself seropositive.

“AIDS was the major epidemic of the twentieth century and remains one of the twenty-first,” notes Professor Jean-François Delfraissy, the Agency for AIDS Research.

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