World AIDS Day: How Science Made HIV Treatable and Preventable

In just half a life, modern science has transformed HIV, one of the most dreaded diseases in human history, into a treatable and preventable disease.

It is a medical wonder that Ruan Uys, HIV positive, remembers every day.

“I wouldn’t be here taking just one pill a day if it weren’t for the people who became HIV positive in the 1980s,” Ruan said.

“They put their bodies in danger. They tested new drugs. Blood, sweat and tears were put into me so that I could be here today.”

He was born in 1981 – the same year the virus began to spread rapidly.

He was diagnosed with HIV in 2014.

Although treatment options were well advanced by then, the moment he found out about his status hit him hard.

“The memories of those announcements of dying people were really etched in my mind. I didn’t know the treatments when I was diagnosed. I was like, ‘is this the end?'” He said. declared.

The HIV activist, who is a program coordinator with the Bobby Goldsmith Foundation and the founder of HIV positive, said he felt a lot of internalized shame.

“I had a lot of shame and internalized stigma that I carried with me.

“I wasn’t educated. I was just trying to stay away from everyone because if I was hanging out with friends it would invariably come out, or I said something, and then I would have to face it.”

It’s a trauma that John Rule understands. He was diagnosed with HIV in 1996.

“I think it is a common experience for people diagnosed with HIV to have a traumatic response to this diagnosis,” said Mr Rule, senior research director at the National Association of People Living with HIV in Australia.

“People who are diagnosed now should feel comfortable that the treatments will work and that they will live a good, long life.

“I can think of a group of six friends, and I’m the only surviving person in that group. So it’s a bit heavy to carry.”

When young homosexuals began to die of a mysterious disease

It has been 40 years since AIDS was first identified as a disease.

In June 1981, young gay men in California and New York began to die suddenly from what appeared to be mysterious cases of pneumonia and rare skin cancer.

It will be years before the link between HIV and AIDS is fully understood.

However, by the time HIV was first identified in America, the disease had already arrived in Australia undetected.

At the time, the country’s gay rights movement was becoming more mainstream.

Demands for equality and freedom from discrimination came from previous vanguards of LGBTQI visibility.

Actor and dancer Robert Helpmann became the first openly gay Australian of the year in 1966.

In 1969, Marion Paull and Claudia Pearce formed the country’s first LGBTQI rights organization.

Outspoken doctor, environmentalist and future Tasmanian senator Bob Brown came out in 1976 in an ABC television interview.

The protests ranged from the most stubborn to the most horrific.

A group of activists in Sydney organized what they called a “Shrove Tuesday” in 1978, marking the International Day of Solidarity with Homosexuality.

They were brutalized, named and humiliated for daring to take to the streets.

Richard Jessop demonstrated in front of a doctor’s office who falsely announced a “cure” for homosexuality.

Mr. Jessop was offering slices of mutton brains to passers-by.

Just as the next generation of LGBTQI rights activists entered the fray, HIV took hold of their burgeoning minds.

People, especially early homosexuals, were dying suddenly. Social conservatives have ruthlessly declared that this is a sign of damnation of God or of nature.

“At that time, many people committed suicide rather than living with the diagnosis of HIV,” said Mr. Rule.

The trauma that galvanized the gay community in the 1980s and 1990s is part of the reason for the disparity in education, diagnostic and support services for other people living with HIV – women, heterosexual men, trans and Indigenous people, drug users. injection drugs, sex workers and those with other major co-morbidities.

“Homosexual men needed to be more educated because it affected us a lot more at the beginning,” he says.

John says it took a long time to get people to understand that HIV is not exclusively a “gay disease”.

“Positive heterosexuals, women, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people or any other group – they need their own space and their own networks, and they need the chance and the opportunity to describe their experiences. “

The importance of trust

Much of Australia’s current expertise in testing and tracing COVID-19, particularly in New South Wales, has been built on systems originally created to find and isolate strings transmission of HIV.

Professor Bill Bowtell is a health policy consultant who was one of the early architects of Australia’s response to HIV / AIDS.

“Unlike COVID where it quickly became apparent you had it, it could sometimes stretch for months or even years,” Professor Bowtell said.

“It wasn’t just who you were with last week or last month, but who were you with during the entire period that you may have been contagious with.”

“The question was, could you prevent it by changing your behavior? “

“The answer to this was, soon to be determined: Yes, you could.

“But that meant getting gay people to change their sexual behavior, to use condoms, to inject drug users to have clean needles and syringes, to have sex workers insist clients wear condoms, and so on. a series of measures designed to significantly improve sanitation in blood transfusions, dentists, doctors and reusable equipment. A whole bunch of things. “

“People had to be confident. They wouldn’t speak openly and honestly if they thought information was going to be abused or turned over to the police, or somehow got them involved in a fine or trouble.”

Origins difficult to pinpoint

Like COVID-19, the exact origins of HIV are difficult to pin down. It is likely that it was present in chimpanzees of Central Africa from the beginning of the 20th century.

Like Ebola and SARS, HIV in humans appears to stem from the dangerous consumption of wild bushmeat.

Scientific models suggest it was largely confined to central Africa until urbanization and mass human movements propelled it across the world.

Why are viral infections so difficult to cure?

Since then, it has killed more than 30 million people and continues to pose a major threat to public health in many parts of the world, including Papua New Guinea and sub-Saharan Africa.

It is an epidemic that UNAIDS, the United Nations program on HIV / AIDS, ambitiously aims to end by 2030.

But UNAIDS chief Winnie Byanyima said there had been a lot of disruption due to COVID-19.

“We have seen the number of people coming for a test decreasing the number of people using prevention tools like condoms and PrEP. [Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis] declining, ”she said.

“Now is the time to warn the world that AIDS is still a pandemic.

“No one should be newly infected, no one should die. But there is a hoarding of technology and know-how, and that is why there is a shortage.

“In Australia, the diagnosis rate was between 1.3 and 1.9 times higher among Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders than among non-natives born in Australia.

“Factors of race, sexuality, sexual orientation, even illiteracy, education, unequal educational standards, economic inequality are all combined. “

The most recent data from 2019 estimates that around 30,000 people in Australia are living with HIV.

Navigating the disclosure of their positive status is a tricky business in workplaces, friendships, families, and intimate relationships.

Mr Rule said many are thriving in silence, or have the potential to do so, despite the burden of outdated stigma.

“If you are a person living with HIV and you are on antiretroviral therapy, then during sex you cannot pass HIV to another person. It is a game changer, ”he said.

“We now have a discussion in the community about quality of life,” explains Ruan Uys.

“I’m in a relationship with someone who’s HIV negative and that’s, you know, he forgets I’m HIV positive until I joke about it.