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[Jesus Malverde]

23. Thirty years after the discovery of HIV, the 1980s scaremongering still causes harm

Some time in the early years of the 20th century, a virus affecting chimpanzees in West Africa made the leap into a human. It mutated, adapting itself to its new host, and started to spread across Africa.
For the West, though, the story of HIV starts in LA, back in 1981, when a few people started showing up to clinics with pneumonia. It was a strain of pneumonia you get when you don’t have too much of an immune system, and doctors were puzzled. These people were young; it was as if they’d turned up with MRSA or arthritis. It was the kind of disease their grandmothers were supposed to have. Then, from the same groups – mostly gay men and drug users – came an equally rare and puzzling skin cancer: Kaposi’s sarcoma. The dots were joined, and public health officials started groping around for a name for this new condition: Gay-Related Immune Deficiency? 4H (Haitians, homosexuals, hemophiliacs and heroin users) disease? As the cases became outbreaks, and the outbreaks became an epidemic, they hit upon “Aids”: a stigma-free choice. It was not to be a stigma-free disease.

The virus was finally isolated in two rival labs at the same time, and the findings were published in the same journal. It’s 30 years this month since the discovery of HIV, and there’s now a sense the story is entering its last chapter, at least in the UK. Medical advances – particularly in antiretroviral therapy – means that it’s extremely rare to die of HIV/Aids. Mothers no longer need pass it on to their children. The rate of infection is getting lower and lower.

But in the British story of HIV, one moment overshadows the rest. If you were alive at the time, there’s little chance you’ll have forgotten the 1980s scare campaigns – the menacing “Tombstone” and “Iceberg” adverts, which said: “There is now a deadly virus, which anyone can catch from sex with an infected person… If you ignore Aids, it could be the death of you.”

At that point, the infection rate was at its height, and these campaigns have been associated with its decline. But they also lingered in the public imagination ever since. In the long run, did they help? Or did they leave a damaging legacy?

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/marthagilltech/100013418/thirty-years-after-the-discovery-of-hiv-the-1980s-scaremongering-still-causes-harm/