The Covid-19 pandemic has been a dominant feature of the news for a year now, and probably for at least another year because of its effect on the world economy. The virus and its mutations will likely remain with us for the rest of time, but because it is “curable” by vaccination and other drugs, it will likely go the way of other typical virus-related diseases that seem to be ever present but not life-threatening, like the common cold or flus. Other diseases remain that cannot be treated without surgery or radiation treatment, like cancer or heart disease. But one virus remains stubbornly resistant to a cure, and remains in many parts of the world a still worse problem than the Covid-19 in spite of the fact that it is no longer “newsworthy”—HIV/AIDS.
The human immunodeficiency/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome first appeared in the U.S. around 1960, but it wasn’t until 1981 that it was first recognized as a serious disease when the first major outbreaks began appearing in gay communities in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, and soon migrating across the country and into the heterosexual realm, and effecting the black and Latino communities at higher rates than whites. The Reagan administration’s response was not unlike that of the Trump administration was to the Covid-19 outbreak; it regarded the problem through the lense of right-wing homophobia, initially believing the virus was limited to the gay community, and thus did not see it as a problem requiring federal attention or intervention. On the other hand, the gay community initially did not believe the medical reporting and disease prevention protocols, probably because they felt unfairly targeted. Because of this initial failure to take HIV/AIDS seriously, it began “super-spreading” throughout the country.
It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that a majority of people were actually personally concerned enough about HIV that they were fearful of any sight of blood on surfaces or oozing from the body. Blood tests for HIV were “recommended” before sexual relations were initiated. More than a decade after the first outbreaks of HIV/AIDS, it was still a matter of concern to people, particular after Los Angeles Lakers star “Magic” Johnson announced that he had tested positive for the virus. If a star athlete could catch the virus, anyone could, and there was still no “cure” or vaccine for it.
Yet by the mid-1990s, HIV/AIDS started to fade from media and public view, and today it is almost completely out of the public consciousness in general—this in spite of the fact that at least 33 million people have died of it worldwide, and including over 700,000 in the U.S., where over 10,000 people still die from it every year. The reason seems to be that for those infected with the virus, it is no longer an instant killer; Johnson has lived with HIV for almost three decades, and more or less “normal” life and life expectancy can be hoped for by those infected today.
Current anti-viral “cocktails” have been largely effective for people who do not yet have full-blown AIDs; The Journal of the American Society of Nephrology reported that HIV-infected patients who are not also infected with the hepatitis C virus have a survival rate similar to that of people who were infected by hepatitis C but were HIV-negative. It also found that it was chronic diseases, like end-stage renal disease (kidney failure), that were now the most likely “opportunistic” diseases that cause HIV-positive cases to advance to AIDS conditions and death.
That doesn’t mean that HIV/AIDS is no longer a serious condition, especially in poorer countries that do not have the same access to treatments those in developed countries have. Even in this country people with chronic kidney problems are most susceptible to HIV infection advancing to full-blown AIDS. HIV remains dangerous because it is one of those rare viruses that appears to be “immune” to being susceptible to immune responses. HIV has a long dormant period, and must be treated during that stage so it doesn’t advance to AIDS. Because it lays dormant for a long period embedded in DNA cells, the body cannot identify it until it advances to the AIDS stage, by which time it is typically too late to treat it. The problem with vaccines is that “dead” forms of the virus do not trigger an immune response from the virus, and naturally using a “live” version of the virus would likely be deadly. HIV also mutates quickly, so even if a vaccine is created, it likely will not work for long.
However, HIV/AIDS was never considered to be a “pandemic,” but an “epidemic” at worst. There may be a reason for that. In the U.S., already 60 percent as many people have died as a result of Covid-19 in less than a year as have died of AIDS in almost four decades. Although “officially” over 2 million people have died of the Covid-19 worldwide, this is almost certainly half the actual number. But unlike for HIV/AIDS, there are now workable vaccines that can combat it and its variants, and while the virus will remain with us for a long time, after a period of “herd immunity” in conjunction with widespread vaccination, it will likely “mutate” into something as non-newsworthy as the common flus and the cold—or cancer or heart disease or any other disease that everyone must succumb to one way or the other.
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