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0 pointsredis_mlc5y ago0 comments

I followed the AIDS crisis in the newspaper from Day One, starting with one-inch long columns about "mysterious purple lesions called Kaposi's sarcoma" to shrines with hundreds of photos occupying whole sections.

The similarity with corona in 2020 is that so little was known, but for years, not months. The difference was that AIDS was 100% fatal until drugs were developed, and AIDS killed a generation of young adults rather than older people.

(There were interviews with a handful of men who were immune to the AIDS virus, but had to endure all of their friends and partners dying, and had to deal with inheriting a lot of possessions that reminded them of dead people.)

Almost all hemophiliacs in North America used pooled blood products from thousands of donors, so just about all of them died. (There's a Canadian film on Youtube that covers this.)

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fortran775y ago

Isaac Asimov was so embarrassed to have contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion that it wasn't mentioned 'til after his death.

djaque5y ago

I had no idea that he died of AIDS and that was in the 90s. It's terrifying how recent it was that he would have received public backlash for contracting a disease during a surgery.

foldr5y ago

I feel like you're leaving homophobia out of the equation. Asimov was ashamed, and there would have been a backlash, because society associated AIDS with gay men. If people had really believed that he'd got it through surgery, there wouldn't have been a bad reaction.

neltnerb5y ago

To be fair, 1990 is 30 years ago.

I remember how much of a hero Magic Johnson was presented as being for simply publicly admitting he got it during surgery and advocating.

It was brave for a multi-millionaire celebrity to admit publicly that he got it by accident. If he'd have been gay too my gosh... what scandal...

Terrifying indeed.

redis_mlcOP5y ago

At the time, some pediatricians used to give moms after birth a pint of blood to "pinken them up" (make their cheeks rosy.)

Of course, that gratuitous pint gave some of them AIDS or liver disease for no useful purpose.

More and more you realize hospitals are the most dangerous place to be, emphasized by corona, but the CDC maintains a list of about 18 infectious diseases rampant in hospitals today.

dekhn5y ago

Yeah- I remember being in high school biology class and we had a poster of AIDS symptoms from HIV infection (KS, along with others). Would have been mid-to-late 1980s. Fast forward to grad school- 1995-2001 and I'm working with protein structures like HIV protease and reverse transcriptase to find drugs that interfere with them. Only around 2001 did drugs start to be approved that were really effective.

I still remember that poster with KS and other symptoms on it, some 35 years later. Folks outside of biology have no idea how slow the time frames of some disease treatments can be.

dghughes5y ago

>There's a Canadian film on Youtube that covers this.

Yeah it was a major scandal here in Canada. The Red Cross lost the right to handle blood a new organization called Canadian Blood Services was created.

Many people with hemophilia died but I think people at the tail end of it were around when the new drug cocktails slowed the disease.

As a teen in the 80s AIDS was pretty scary even for a straight kid with no girlfriend. It seemed like everyone was talking about it, getting it, scared of people with it, or denying it existed.

Anthony Fauci had a hard time getting Pres. Reagan to even take it seriously (sound familiar!?). Many conservatives saw it as the "gay disease" and dismissed it as irrelevant.

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