And the Band Played On
This evening I went to quite an amazing lecture at the Oxford Union. Professor Harold Jaffe, who was one of the people who worked on the very first cases of AIDS in the US in 1981, gave a lecture on what it first looked like and how they eventually worked out a diagnosis. (There were only eight people there! Rhodes scholars and AIDS workers and Phd students in Global Health and... me. Ahem.)
It was absolutely fascinating, how AIDS presented in the first place. It was first manifested as Kaposi’s Sarcoma, a cancer that caused skin lesions and was only ever seen, in mere handfuls of patients per year, in men over 60. They were usually from Southern Italy, and died with it rather than of it.
But all of a sudden, here were multiple young gay men in San Francisco with this cancer that was simply never seen in young healthy people. Eventually, they found that the disease was viral, borne in the blood, and sexually transmitted. Then the doctors found haemophiliacs, babies and surgical patients with the same symptoms. Unbelievably, even when they discovered it was blood-borne, it was ages before the blood industry would test for it (researchers discovered that the Hepatitis B test was 88% effective in detecting AIDS). The discovery that the banks were knowingly transfusing patients with AIDS-tainted blood was so dramatic, and the blood industry had to pay out so many millions of dollars in lawsuits, that to this day, gay men aren’t allowed to donate blood in the US, even if they’re tested clear of AIDS.
Throughout the lecture Jaffe showed clips from the movie And The Band Played On, in which he features, explaining the process they went through and in between showing us slides of stats and studies. At the beginning he reminded us of something that I think all of us had briefly forgotten - that there was NOTHING they could do for AIDS patients in the first years. It was a death sentence, and a quick one. If you were diagnosed, you died of it within about six months. It seems quite unbelievable that medicine has progressed to the stage that people with AIDS can live a normal span of years if properly cared for, when you look at the devastation it wreaked when first discovered. (And, of course, is still wreaking in places where people aren’t properly cared for.)
It was a privilege to have the whole thing explained by someone who was there in the very beginning, and has spent his life fighting AIDS. I’m proud to be married to someone who’s going to spend his life fighting it too! I left the Union straight after the lecture (before anyone could ask me my thoughts!), out through the ancient reading rooms and libraries and bought And The Band Played On at HMV. It’s fantastic, well worth viewing if you’re interested.
It was absolutely fascinating, how AIDS presented in the first place. It was first manifested as Kaposi’s Sarcoma, a cancer that caused skin lesions and was only ever seen, in mere handfuls of patients per year, in men over 60. They were usually from Southern Italy, and died with it rather than of it.
But all of a sudden, here were multiple young gay men in San Francisco with this cancer that was simply never seen in young healthy people. Eventually, they found that the disease was viral, borne in the blood, and sexually transmitted. Then the doctors found haemophiliacs, babies and surgical patients with the same symptoms. Unbelievably, even when they discovered it was blood-borne, it was ages before the blood industry would test for it (researchers discovered that the Hepatitis B test was 88% effective in detecting AIDS). The discovery that the banks were knowingly transfusing patients with AIDS-tainted blood was so dramatic, and the blood industry had to pay out so many millions of dollars in lawsuits, that to this day, gay men aren’t allowed to donate blood in the US, even if they’re tested clear of AIDS.
Throughout the lecture Jaffe showed clips from the movie And The Band Played On, in which he features, explaining the process they went through and in between showing us slides of stats and studies. At the beginning he reminded us of something that I think all of us had briefly forgotten - that there was NOTHING they could do for AIDS patients in the first years. It was a death sentence, and a quick one. If you were diagnosed, you died of it within about six months. It seems quite unbelievable that medicine has progressed to the stage that people with AIDS can live a normal span of years if properly cared for, when you look at the devastation it wreaked when first discovered. (And, of course, is still wreaking in places where people aren’t properly cared for.)
It was a privilege to have the whole thing explained by someone who was there in the very beginning, and has spent his life fighting AIDS. I’m proud to be married to someone who’s going to spend his life fighting it too! I left the Union straight after the lecture (before anyone could ask me my thoughts!), out through the ancient reading rooms and libraries and bought And The Band Played On at HMV. It’s fantastic, well worth viewing if you’re interested.