Sarah Corapi is a third-year student at Grinnell College with a major in Sociology and a concentration in Neuroscience. She tends to favor an interdisciplinary approach to all things health and illness related and is hoping to apply this approach to a career in public health after graduation. When not writing papers, Sarah can be found cruising off-topic (but fascinating!) Wikipedia pages and drinking tea by the gallon.
Those of you who follow the news are probably aware of the cycle of articles claiming “New HIV Cure: Tashack Herb Treats 90 Without Side Effects And Nears Final Stage” and “Closer To An HIV Cure? No Trace Of Virus After 2 Men Underwent Stem Cell Transplants.” Articles such as these have been appearing for years, while the number of those living with HIV infections and those dying of AIDS is increasing. While there have been significant discoveries in understanding the HIV virus in the scientific field, the politics behind the science and the application of medical knowledge on the ground seems to many to be lacking and uneven in distribution.
In a recent study, the rate of new HIV infections in black women and men was eight times greater than white women and men, and three times higher in Latinos and Latinas than in whites. In a 2009 open letter to the president, John-Manuel Andriote reported that men who have sex with men (MSM) make up 63 percent of all new HIV infections in the United States, yet this group receives a small percentage of the federally budgeted HIV/AIDS funding and, in addition, endures the continued stigma of HIV/AIDS and anti-gay sentiments.
Indeed, the medical establishment in the United States, which promotes itself as being objective in its observations and measures, has failed and continues to fail in its response to socially and politically charged illnesses such as HIV/AIDS. From the first incidents of HIV/AIDS in the United States back in 1981 up until today, thirty two years later, the responses on the part of the government, individuals, and the medical institution have been slow, weak, and insufficient. It is these responses from the first AIDS case up until the present that have allowed the virus to spread and become an AIDS epidemic. The history of HIV/AIDS shows a medical establishment that has never been and is still not removed from the society it resides in.
When young and otherwise healthy men began appearing in their physicians’ offices with Kaposi’s Sarcoma, a relatively more rare form of cancer which typically affected older individuals, public health officials began drawing the link between this sudden surge in remarkably similar cases and the sexual behavior of the men involved. As it appeared to be presenting in only in gay men this new disease received the name of GRID (Gay-related immune deficiency), colloquially called “gay cancer.”
And there, in its very naming, the affected individuals were marginalized and blamed for their illness. In an early article detailing a “New Homosexual Disorder” from the New York Times (circa. 1982), epidemiologists declared “the general public need not fear an epidemic.” Physician Lawrence D. Mass reflected the views of many health and government officials in stating that ”gay people whose life style consists of anonymous sexual encounters are going to have to do some serious rethinking.” From that point on, the policy in the handling of HIV/AIDS cases became, in the words of Randy Shilts, a slogan of “Don’t offend the gays and don’t inflame the homophobes. These were the twin horns on which the handling of this epidemic [was] torn from the first day.”[1]
The lack of any response from the federal government from the beginning of the AIDS epidemic has been one of the largest contributing factors to the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS. The populations initially affected by the disease were not part of the then newly-elected President Ronald Reagan’s constituency. As Shilts has remarked, “AIDS was sexuality and death: not the stuff that politicians are want to gravitate toward.”[2] Add to that the general lack of public interest and the gay community’s initial lack of concern regarding AIDS, the voices of the few worried physicians and activists were left unheard.
While the United States has definitely made headway in understanding the causes of HIV/AIDS, the quality and availability of medical care to those affected by the illness, as well as various federal, state, and administrative policies, differ greatly across lines of class, gender, race, and sexuality. Even today, there remain many who believe that for those who contract HIV/AIDS, “[their] illness is not merely a function of [their] physiology; rather the disease is a condemnation of character.”[3] And as that stigma remains relevant to the quality of and access to medical care, the medical establishment remains entirely imbedded within and subject to political maneuverings and social pressures.
[1] Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007), 69.
[2] Greg Behrman, The Invisible People: How the U.S. Has Slept Through the Global AIDS Pandemic, the Greatest Humanitarian Catastrophe of Our Time Free Press, 2004), 12
[3] Carl Rollyson, Reading Susan Sontag: A Critical Introduction to Her Work (Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 151
