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from two free months of valuable education imagine being told you are

going to die maybe not today maybe not this week maybe not even this year but

something inside you nobody understood was going to kill you then imagine your

partner your family and your closest friends were also going to die many of

them already have I know you know what I'm dancing around because YouTube

doesn't let you tease things but I want you to really imagine how that feels and

imagine in the midst of this the government even society at large doesn't

seem to care whether you or the people that you love die maybe some even say

it's justified God's wrath or whatever what do you do what do you do next when

you find out that disease is inside you hi I'm Tristan Johnson and this is step

back HIV the virus behind AIDS exposes when a society doesn't value all its

citizens lives through Herculean scientific endeavors it's become a

disease that is quick and easy to detect and can be managed through medications

it just requires societies to agree to spend the resources to fight it I want

to preface this history video when we talk about HIV it's not just history it

is a virus that still affects millions today the lgbtq+ community people of

color drug users sex workers and the poor on the globe of the prime targets

where the state camped in the case of many developing countries or won't in

the case of developed ones give these groups the resources needed to fight the

virus it says a lot about who does and does not have power in this world so

let's rewind back to when HIV first made itself known the situation looked not

only dire but apocalyptic something capable of wiping out huge numbers of

people brought the specter of tragedy and death to so many community

relationships and families and those who held the keys to the world's resources

they seemed content to let people die rather than lift a finger to help it

seemed like an impossible situation communities faced oblivion and no matter

how hard they voted nothing changed for a long time the brutal fight against

AIDS led by grassroots activists and organizations was nothing short of a

miracle born of necessity and this is the story I'm telling today let's start

with the facts what is HIV and why is it such a

debilitating disease that even today we have not found a true cure for now most

of you know that I'm not a scientist so I grabbed one off the internet to

explain what HIV is welcome Patrick Kelly from the channel coporis your

immune system is kind of important it's one of the reasons you're not dead right

now but people infected with HIV or the

human immunodeficiency virus have much weaker immune systems this makes it way

easier for them to catch a life-threatening bug or even develop

certain types of cancer no all virus is spread by hijacking a host cell

replicating themselves in it and then destroying that cell an HIV infects cd4

or t-cells one of those important cells in the immune system the lower the

somebody's cd4 count is generally the weaker their immune system is and if

that cd4 count gets really low like less than 200 cells per cubic millimeter of

blood then that person is diagnosed with AIDS they can also get diagnosed if they

catch an opportunistic infection a disease that they wouldn't normally

catch if they had a healthy immune system unfortunately once you have HIV

you have it for life treatments in the form of antiretroviral therapies or a

RTS can help suppress the virus but won't get rid of it so keep that in mind

no matter who catches this disease it's something they have to deal with for the

rest of their life so how did HIV spread so far and fast to answer that we need

to go back even farther than the 1980s when people first noticed something was

going on the virus like many that have plagued us over the years was

transferred from animals to us the ancestor of HIV is a similar virus found

in primates called SIV or simian immunodeficiency

virus HIV x' lineage can be mapped through some fantastic detective work

that would make a great future video these medical detectives traced HIV s

likely origin to a version of SIV found in one of our closest animal relatives

the chimpanzee the transfer is thought to have occurred because of the bushmeat

or wild game trade it is possible someone prepared a chimpanzee for food

something not unheard of in Africa and some infected chimpanzee blood made

contact with a cut the butcher had this transfer from animal to human was not a

one-time exchange researchers think it has happened several times

HIV mutates more than the average virus and those detectives have traced

different versions to multiple crossovers over the years creating

different strains of HIV the strains tied to this crisis come from a single

crossover and scientists have estimated the time and place have happened

somewhere in the African nation of Cameroon a little more than a hundred

years ago around 1908 from this first transfer the virus spread to the major

Congolese city Kinshasa where it flourished at the time the city was

colonial and called Leopoldville and yes the horrors of this period of Congolese

history will be an upcoming video there the virus spread through prostitution

and the fact that in back in 1908 disposable syringes hadn't been invented

that's right doctors at this time used blast syringes and they clean them

between patients only with alcohol as you may have guessed this wasn't enough

to kill the virus and may have in fact spread the virus to other syringes from

Kinshasa the virus spread around the globe in the 1960s a bunch of Haitians

move there for work because of the common French language however after a

nationalist movement turned Congo into the nation of is a year many of those

immigrants were pushed back to Haiti and HIV went along for the ride

back in Haiti there was a blood plasma donation center in their capital Portal

Paz and it was especially effective at spreading the disease around because

I've mixed all the blood together a big no-no HIV made it to the US around 1969

via either a bag of infected plasma or a person the whole patients hero story

about the French Canadian airline worker is not true

HIV takes about a decade to develop into AIDS so the disease went unnoticed until

about 1980 suddenly healthy young gay men started

getting rare cancers and infections these are the kinds of infections or

cancers your immune system can typically be easily but in this case they were

deadly one of the most common was something called Kaposi's sarcoma which

is unique because it creates these odd purple blotches on the skin these purple

marks in the skin became grim icons of AIDS later on the root problem is they

all had a sudden drop in their immune system they didn't know it yet but all

these people had AIDS in these early days doctors were clueless as to what

was going on all they knew was young gay men were losing their helper t4 cells

and then dying they had no clue how its spread or how to protect themselves many

close to these early AIDS victims remember elaborate biohazard procedures

both to protect the immunocompromised patients and the healthy doctors friends

and family see at this time no one knew if touching people could spread the

infection in these days HIV was called grid or gay-related immune deficiency

and quickly got the empathetic nickname a cancer for all these reasons aids

could be an isolating lonely death many gay people in the 1980s and even today

were rejected by their families for who they were laws surrounding visitation

meant their partners and chosen families were often unable to visit add in the

protective measures and you can imagine the horror and sorrow someone might

experience there alone on a bed two emaciated in week to even move let alone

walk although AIDS was associated with gay men other people started exhibiting

symptoms of the disease especially people with haemophilia a condition

which prevents your blood from clotting people with haemophilia require many

blood transfusions and at this time blood wasn't screened for HIV so they

began contracting the disease then it showed up in infants who got it from

breast milk IV drug users who shared needles and

heterosexual women and men showing this wasn't just a disease confined to the

gay community after seeing these cases doctors concluded that AIDS spread

through blood breast milk and unprotected sex by 1986 two separate

teams of scientists converged on HIV and discovered it was causing AIDS let's

zoom out to the broader American society in the 1980's Americans were at the peak

of Reagan mania people wore big shoulder pads big hair and were excited to hate

the poor openly again so in this bold decade what bold action

to the United States take to fight this disease oh right they did nothing Ronald

Reagan didn't even say the word AIDS until 1985 after 5,000 people had

already died of the disease when asked about it the White House would respond

with laughter pointing out Americans don't really approve of that lifestyle

people were dying and because of politics hatred bigotry and the cold

black heart in every conservative they laughed when people died alone and

emaciated in a hospital bed 300,000 people in the US had the disease in the

most powerful country on earth mocked them ok I'm repeating myself this is

just so baffling and from a presidency that's looked upon positively finally in

1985 after a teenager with hemophilia named Ryan White was banned from school

for having AIDS activists had a story they could tell Ryan White was just an

innocent kid and this kid at long last convinced the u.s. to act the Food and

Drug Administration released a commercial blood test and blood banks

began to screen for the disease and the Department of Health and Human Services

in the World Health Organization held the first International AIDS Conference

so I asked earlier what do you do when the government is can

tend to let you and the people you care about die well I guess asking politely

doesn't work in this chaotic period many grassroots AIDS groups emerge to help

the dying prevent further infection and fund necessary research to fight this

crushing disease the biggest organization was the AIDS coalition to

unleash power or act up founded by Larry Kramer they raised money for AIDS

research at a frantic pace since then they've become the model for fighting

for disease research money if the government wouldn't acknowledge AIDS

victims voluntarily activists would force the issue act up and other group

stage protests placing a large AIDS quilt in the National Mall they trashed

the New York Stock Exchange bell ringing ceremony one of the most hardcore

actions I found was activists through the ashes of dead AIDS victims at the

White House and demanded they be seen before I get into the major scientific

breakthroughs that prevented HIV from becoming a death sentence I want to

point out even today the most significant factors preventing HIV from

spreading aren't expensive pharmaceutical inventions of social

programs act up did the necessary work setting up needle exchange programs

creating education campaigns and distributing condoms to those that

needed them the effectiveness of the programs I mentioned earlier are exactly

why I said that HIV is a disease that affects those without power

those who the wealthy have determined are unworthy of the necessities of life

activists hard work turn this disease around now I'd be remiss if I didn't

talk about some significant scientific breakthroughs that made spreading the

disease harder and most importantly make living with a disease more manageable

with activists research money and eventual big grudging support of the

government several major medications and therapies turn HIV from a death sentence

something manageable the first significant breakthrough came in 1987

scientists developed a medication called azita thymidine that are known by it's

easier to pronounce acronym a said t AZT was a true marvel of pharmaceutical

research it could not stop but could slow the disease's progression

buying people precious years but they said T was also profoundly expensive

which meant many couldn't afford it despite going on the market in 1987

deaths from AIDS peaked in 1995 in 1997 a new combination of treatments called

highly active antiretroviral therapy or heart became a standard cutting aids

deaths almost in half over the next three years in 2003 the FDA approved HIV

test kits which can detect the disease in just 20 minutes

today medical science has progressed to the point that while you can't cure the

disease you can make it basically untraceable in your system and prevent

you from spreading it another drug option called prep can help people who

might be at risk of contracting HIV from getting it in the first place okay to be

able to tell these lesser-known stories from history I need to pay the bills so

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helping me give attention to histories that sometimes get forgotten after a

heart became the standard treatment deaths from AIDS plummeted

at least amongst those who could afford it as it affected them less many

middle-class white people in the lgbtq+ community moved away from AIDS activism

to fight for civil rights specifically the right to get married though the

ghosts and trauma of so many dead partners and friends still haunts many

older lgbtq+ people to this day this didn't mean however that HIV was gone

interest and resources for fighting the disease did but the disease is still

prevalent around the globe to this day though there have been some improvements

the global South still suffers huge HIV infection rates the spread of HIV is

preventable but the legacy of colonization and

current colonization under the rebranding of neoliberal global

capitalism leaves these people in massive debt to rich countries and

without the resources to give those of HIV the medicine education and social

programs necessary to control the disease some initiatives to help control

HIV in the global south have occurred but they are nowhere near sufficient and

even in the first world HIV is still around those live Society doesn't value

people of color the poor injection drug users sex workers in the trans community

struggle with disproportionately high numbers of HIV infections in some places

such as Mississippi the HIV epidemic is actually getting worse rather than

better it's gone to the point where almost half of black men who have sex

with men will contract the disease in their lifetime this is a state that

voted against expanding their minuscule public health care service Medicaid as

I've said before HIV is a disease that we can beat but to do so we need to

establish that health care is a right for everyone we need to value the

injection drug dealers life the same as the CEO and it seems the free market

just isn't up to the task we all drop the ball you mean everyone

but we can't just rely on a political solution because anything established by

the government can just be undone by the next administration we need to like when

act-up was founded realize that in health injustice and inequality we can't

just toss in a ballot every few years and wipe our hands and say we did

our job we need to build the things to make the world better now in your

community in my community with our own efforts no act or change in government

is going to make a solution that can't just be taken away the only solution to

the world's problems that can't be voted away by the next administration is when

we make ourselves and when you think that the problems of the world are just

too big or too hopeless think of these people who faced literal death and

Armageddon and had no allies in power but with hard-fought victory after

hard-fought victory they forced the world to listen they didn't ask nicely

but demanded their right to exist