World Aids Day: the disease that changed the world

Today, seventy million people are infected with a virus that 30 years ago no one had heard of. To mark World Aids Day on December 1, Michael Hanlon considers the impact of HIV/Aids on science and society.

The London Eye turned red to mark World AIDS Day 2010. More than 80 landmarks across 13 countries joined in to promote awareness of the ongoing fight against the AIDS epidemic. Photo: GETTY

By Michael Hanlon

In June 1981, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia issued a landmark report about five young gay men in Los Angeles who had died from a mysterious condition that had destroyed their immune systems.

Within two years, Aids (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) was changing the world. Any disease with the capacity to infect and kill millions will have a profound effect, but this modern ‘plague’ was different. It was an odd, horrible disease; a collection of separate illnesses. Chest infections, typically Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) were a common indicator, as was Kaposi’s Sarcoma, a rare form of skin cancer. But most sufferers were swamped by a tide of common, usually trivial bacterial, viral and fungal infections that overwhelmed their weakened bodies.

The advent of Aids would forever alter the way we think and talk about sex and sexuality; it would bring previously taboo subjects out into the open. It involved issues of race and celebrity, wealth and poverty, highlighting as never before the inequalities between the rich West and the developing world.

This was a disease that was co-opted by gay-rights activists, liberals and bigots alike. Who can forget the infamous comment by James Anderton, then Chief Constable of Manchester Police that gay men were ‘swirling in a cesspool of their own making’? Or celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Elton John and Madonna who championed the cause and the victims?

Aids arrived just as Western Society was on the verge of a decadent sexual free-for-all. The sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies had gone mainstream. Drug use was at an all-time high, sex tourism (an important factor in the spread of the causative agent HIV) was a major growth industry. And across Europe and North America an exuberant gay scene had emerged to replace the furtive life homosexuals had endured only a decade previously.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/8920482/World-Aids-Day-the-disease-that-changed-the-world.html