Important Numbers

Tens of thousands of people died of AIDS-related complications before our government began to address it. Many, many, many of those people spent their last breaths in the centre of protests in the streets, begging for justice and relief. Their ashes were dumped on the White House lawn.

That activism has reverberations today, in the work between public health and community health advocates. That’s a difference, not a similarity.

To attempt to draw blithe comparisons – Oh! This feels so scary and there are lines at the grocery store and people have to stay away from each other. Hey, does this feel like when HIV happened…? – is an insult to the bravery and sacrifice of the living and the dead.

There is no comparison. Fuck that. Just stop.

Mark S. King is the award-winning writer of My Fabulous Disease. He has been nominated for multiple awards for his coverage of HIV/AIDS issues. This piece originally appeared on My Fabulous Disease and is reposted with permission.

It took a year before US President Reagan publicly uttered the word “AIDS”, when over 12,000 Americans had died and the virus had begun to spread swiftly through haemophiliac populations and injection drug users. THE ‘GAY PLAGUE’

A government report from August 2016 found that since the start of the AIDS epidemic, nearly 700,000 people have died of AIDS in the US alone. South Africa has the biggest HIV epidemic in the world, with 7.7 million people living with HIV. HIV prevalence among the general population is high at 20.4%. Prevalence is even higher among men who have sex with men, transgender women, sex workers and people who inject drugs. In South Africa, 90% of people living with HIV aware of their status in 2018.

South Africa was the first country in sub-Saha- ran Africa to fully approve PrEP, which is now being made available to people at high risk of infection.