Category Archives: Community Engagement

Today marks another World AIDS Day. APCO’s Linda Distlerath has been working in this field for decades and shares her thoughts on how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go. Having worked in the HIV/AIDS field for more than 20 years, I find myself each December 1 – World AIDS Day – reflecting on how far we have come in tackling the global HIV/AIDS pandemic and contemplating what the future will bring. This past year marked the 30th anniversary of the first reports from U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) of unusual cases of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and pneumocystis pneumonia in gay men, both later recognized as opportunistic infections associated with HIV infection and diagnostic of full-blown AIDS. Hence, 1981 is seen as the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in terms of public attention to a frightening and previously unknown infectious threat. Over the next 15 years, much effort was focused on the scientific, clinical and epidemiological aspects of HIV infection and AIDS with significant investment by the U.S. government through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the CDC among other government agencies, along with the research-based pharmaceutical industry. But 1996, the 15-year mark of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, was a watershed year for science, the industry and people living with HIV/AIDS, at least in the United States, Europe and other health resource-rich regions. In that year, the notion of the “triple-combination cocktail” of antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV infection – taking viral load to undetectable levels for prolonged periods – came to life, and indeed brought life back to those ravaged by AIDS.