30 Years After

"I was not yet a reporter when the plague began, so my memories of that time are not professional memories, but personal. I was a student, studying mostly theatre, and almost all my friends were gay. And suddenly my friends were dying. People who remember will know what I mean. We got used to seeing people we worked and drank with looking, abruptly, like famine victims. We grew battlefield-numb bringing meals, and attending memorials, and calling people’s mothers on their death anniversaries. We knew when the multi-drug cocktails that changed the course of the epidemic had arrived, not because we read the journal articles, but because suddenly we could take our florists off our speed-dial." - Maryn McKenna

What a terrible scourge. I am old enough to remember the fear that was prevalent during the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. You'd hardly know it today, as complacency has mostly replaced fear. Science has worked hard to understand this virus, and has created powerful drugs have beaten back this beast, for those who can afford them. AIDS was once a tragic death sentence, but is now considered by many in the west to be no more than a chronic inconvenience.

As in all things though, for the poor, especially in the third world, nothing has really changed. SIV emerged from the African rain forest somewhere near Kinshasa in the Congo. It jumped species from chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys to humans, probably as a result of the bushmeat trade, and rapidly evolved into the killer we all know of as HIV. Although we've long since forgotten the disease here in the west, in that place where it was born HIV continues to brutally ravage humanity.