One wonders if we are doing ourselves a disservice maintaining a term more inline with shared symptoms instead of separating the diseases into shared causes.
At any rate I'm digressing, but cancer is a fascinating (while horrible) concept that exists in our reality. When you think about it, it is probably more responsible for what we are today than any other force on the planet, in evolutionary terms.
As for AIDS: The fact that it was a "gay disease" hampered everything about our response to it. I'd like to think that we would be much more in tune with emerging health threats these days, but somehow I doubt it. I really hope we have HIV licked in a few years though, because Africa really, really needs a vaccine before it can do anything else really.
The problem was that they didn't know the cause of the Kaposi's Sarcoma outbreak. They correctly suspected a virus caused the outbreak.
It just happens to be a cancer that is overwhelmingly more common in people suffering from HIV than in the general population.
What kind of cancers don't fit this definition?
For example, cervical cancer is often caused by HPV, which is why school-age girls are routinely immunised against it in the UK.
Why "gay disease" in quotes? Was it not a disease with origins exclusively in gays?
Most of the worlds population don't have the financial resources or the proximity to say, the UCSF medical hospital, where such specialty physicians would be to study such a thing.
There's been quite a bit of discussion of how it got to Christopher Street in New York. My pet theory is that the international drug trade had quite a bit to do with it, but I'm just a computer programmer
In my opinion it is one of the most powerful scenes in the movie, in the sense that it does an amazing job with taking the viewer back to that time period where AIDS was a mystery disease.
I thought it was a good movie but it had touches of right-wing propaganda.
http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/basics/ataglance.html
What an un-PC virus. Doesn't it know we're living in 2013? I'm told reality is supposed to have a liberal bias now.
Besides she was clearly a troubled youth, with sexual abuse home and her further abusive relationships conveyed early in the movie.
A brief history mostly off the top of my head
1 - reagan didn't care at all about aids until an actor friend of his died of it;
2 - the strong perception within the fda was that reagan didn't care about aids / didn't want anything done about it;
3 - reagan allowed his staff to delete a mention of ryan white from a speech;
4 - reagan didn't mention aids publicly until mid 1987
Writing in the Washington Post in late 1985, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los
Angeles, stated: "It is surprising that the president could remain silent as
6,000 Americans died, that he could fail to acknowledge the epidemic's
existence. Perhaps his staff felt he had to, since many of his New Right
supporters have raised money by campaigning against homosexuals." [1]
6 - I don't remember this as well, but I believe hiv patients also had to fight the fda for early-ending of clinical trials, because they were insisting that people taking placebos should basically die
So some of this is similar to why many gay people of the right age hate Ed Koch, but an aggressive intervention by the reagan administration might have saved many lives.
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/Reagan-s-AID...
http://aids.gov/hiv-aids-basics/hiv-aids-101/aids-timeline/
Reagan has been criticized for his complete non-response to AIDS as well. He mentioned it in passing in 1985, and didn't actually address the issue until 1987. Since AIDS mostly affected homosexuals and drug users, AIDS wasn't exactly a high priority for the Reagan administration in light of the Religious Right's massive power at the time. The popular rhetoric of the era was more akin to "AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality" than compassion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/politics/09policy.html
To quote Reagan's biographer: "Reagan's response to this epidemic was halting and ineffective."
My impression is (and I have not studied this) the failure in the HIV epidemic (pandemic?) wasn't a failure to develop drugs, it was a failure to perform basic epidemiological interventions to learn about and slow the progress of the disease.
Edit: Here's the takeaway quote, in my opinion: "Cancer is not believed to be contagious, but conditions that might precipitate it, such as particular viruses or environmental factors, might account for an outbreak among a single group."
Edit2: "Dr. Curran said there was no apparent danger to nonhomosexuals from contagion.'"
http://aids.gov/hiv-aids-basics/hiv-aids-101/how-you-get-hiv...
If an HIV+ person sneezes in an elevator, some will have a panic attack, I reckon.
Not to mention the travel bans some countries impose.
1) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/30/hiv-travel-ban-lift...
3) http://www.unaids.org/en/targetsandcommitments/eliminatingtr...
Still much work to be done in informing people, so let this be an opportunity to ask your friends and family whether they know their facts on the matter, as HIV+ people are treated like lepers oftentimes.
Bonus trivia for reading along this far: Andrew Sullivan is HIV+.
"Dr. Friedman-Kien said he had tested nine of the victims and found severe defects in their immunological systems. The patients had serious malfunctions of two types of cells called T and B cell lymphocytes, which have important roles in fighting infections and cancer.
But Dr. Friedman-Kien emphasized that the researchers did not know whether the immunological defects were the underlying problem or had developed secondarily to the infections or drug use."
At the time there was also a bit of a dispute between American and French researchers over credit for the discovery and subsequent development of the diagnostic test.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14881-was-robert-gallo...
http://www.amazon.com/AIDS-Accusation-Haiti-Geography-Blame/...
But they didn't know it was acquired, or that it was a virus, or that it wasn't just gay related, or anything else much.
Is that because GRID already was occurring in Africa, and people getting KS and dying of it, or was it just a common cancer in Africa for unrelated reasons?
Kaposi's Sarcoma (KS) is caused by a herpes virus: KSHV, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaposi_sarcoma-associated_herp...
We see KS in HIV patients because they are often concomitant infections and because KS is opportunistic, attacking immune-suppressed people. But, this doesn't mean that KS necessarily goes hand-in-hand with HIV infection.
Particular forms of KS affect younger people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_cutaneous_Kaposi_sarco... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_lymphadenopathic_Kapos...
KS may have been 9% of all cancers in equatorial Africa just because of a very high KSHV prevalence and because lower life expectancy = fewer age-related cancers.
There was a similar rate recogised since the 1950s http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200004063421407 This article also notes that KS now accounts for 50% of tumours in some countries, with and without HIV infection.
An NHS article which admits that, even today, they're not exactly sure how many incidents of KS are HIV-related http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Kaposis-sarcoma/Pages/Introduct...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases/dp...