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From 'gay plague' to global tragedy: An AIDS anniversary
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-05-19 11:15 PARIS - The campaign against AIDS marks an important anniversary this week, bringing to mind victories of science and the human spirit but also defeats, stigma and ignorance in a combat that has claimed more lives than World War I.
On May 20 1983, in a paper published in the US journal Science, a team from France's Pasteur Institute, led by Luc Montagnier, described a suspect virus found in a patient who had died of AIDS. Montagnier's groundbreaking work led to the determination by US researcher Robert Gallo that the virus was indeed the cause of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). At last, a key had been found to understanding the mysterious immune-ravaging disease -- the "gay plague" as British tabloids smugly called it -- which had surfaced among American homosexuals two years earlier. It took another three years to resolve a spat over the pair's rival claims to be first to discover the AIDS virus, enabling the duo to share equally in the glory. The mood was upbeat. Never had a new, killer pathogen been identified so quickly. Stoked by the success of antibiotics and the polio vaccine, optimism was brimming that this threat would now be stopped in its tracks. "Today's discovery represents the triumph of science over a dreaded disease," the then US health secretary Margaret Heckler declared, when Gallo staked his claim on the virus discovery in April 1984. "We hope to have a vaccine ready for testing in about two years." Few promises have been so tragically premature. When Heckler uttered those words, the tally of known cases of AIDS was less than 3,000. Today, the number stands at 25 million dead, heterosexual and homosexual alike, and another 33 million infected. The scale of human misery, though, is incalculable. A ragged army of more than 11 million children have lost one or both parents to the disease. So what happened? "In the field of AIDS, a huge number of mistakes have been made over the past 25 years," sighs a leading French researcher, Olivier Schwartz. On the plus side, the men and women in lab coats made good headway against HIV. |
