Saturday is the 40th anniversary of the first 5 reports of AIDS in the U.S.
Physicians/public health experts are publishing moving recollections of those horrific early days and the progress since. Plus tons of new stats. I'll try to link to them in this thread as I see them.
Some stats from UNAIDS today
The good: AIDS-related deaths have fallen by 43% and new infections by 30% since 2010.
The bad: 6 out of 7 new infections among 15–19 year olds in sub-Saharan Africa are among girls, and AIDS-related illness is the leading cause in women 15–49 yrs
At the UN General Assembly High-Level Meeting on AIDS next week, world leaders will be urged to commit to ending AIDS by 2030
Recommended reading: this moving and startlingly personal account of 40 years of AIDS, including the grief and loss in the early years, by @ChrisBeyrer
In the U.S. things have changed drastically in terms of HIV cases, showing the awesome power of the antiretroviral drugs: HIV incidence decreased by 73% between 1984 and 2019
And of course the power of preventive therapy, which has become more sophisticated. A new form of PrEP for HIV is 6 injections a year instead of 365 pills
The gains are not distributed evenly across all racial and economic groups, though. The proportion of Black people among total HIV cases increased from 29% in 1984 to 41% in 2019, and for Hispanic/Latinx people from 16% to 29%.
Transgender women, and especially transgender women of color, are at particularly high risk of HIV: 62% of Black transgender women are HIV-positive compared with 17% of transgender white women:
NEW: Medical journals like JAMA and the NEJM are blind to structural racism and the ways in which discrimination became embedded in medicine over generations, some scientists say.
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The journals favor studies linking race or racial inequities to socioeconomic or biological factors rather than to systemic racism, the critics said. A review by the NYT showed that five top medical journals publish more papers with the term "race" than with "racism."
The top editor at JAMA excised the word "racism" and watered down the conclusions of papers about high death rates among pregnant Black women and on the long-reaching impact of historical redlining on preterm birth, according to two high-profile researchers.