Dr. Anthony Fauci's NIH statement on National Gay Men's HIV/AIDs Awareness Day

September 25, 5:21 PMHealth and Science ExaminerP. Elizabeth Anderson

Previous Next

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Health and Science Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Director NIAID

On Sept. 27, the second annual National Gay Men's HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, we pause to mourn the hundreds of thousands of gay and bisexual men who have died with AIDS, and we strengthen our resolve to end this terrible scourge.

In the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States, the virus wreaked most of its initial devastation in this community, cutting short the promising lives of numerous young people and causing heartbreak among the friends and family members of those who became infected and had no good medicines to fight the virus.

Since the disease was first recognized in the early 1980s, more than 487,000 gay and bisexual men in the United States have been diagnosed with AIDS and more than 274,000 have died.

The epidemic continues to affect gay and bisexual men to a degree that far surpasses their proportion of the U.S. population.

Despite these crushing losses and alarming statistics, the community of gay and bisexual men early on took responsibility for understanding the science of HIV/AIDS and has never wavered in its courageous advocacy for HIV/AIDS education, prevention and treatment.

Gay AIDS activists have fought vocally, tirelessly and successfully to widen access to new treatments and to participate in shaping the HIV/AIDS research agenda. By educating themselves about HIV/AIDS and arguing cogently for improvements to the status quo, gay activists gained a seat at the table to design HIV/AIDS studies.

In so doing, they created a new model for the relationship between patients suffering from serious diseases and scientists developing and testing ways to better detect, treat and prevent these diseases.

Gay AIDS activists also influenced the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to create new accelerated approval regulations that give patients rapid access to new therapies to treat serious or life-threatening illnesses.

In addition, the activists influenced FDA to give patients access to promising investigational drugs when satisfactory alternatives are unavailable and the patients cannot participate in controlled clinical trials. Individuals with many other serious diseases now benefit from these groundbreaking legacies of the AIDS movement. Gay and bisexual men have been active participants in HIV/AIDS research.?

 

National Gay Men's HIV/AIDS Awareness Day marks a time to honor the memories of those whose lives have been taken by this dreadful disease by recommitting ourselves to research to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS.

I thank gay and bisexual men for their activism on behalf of people with HIV/AIDS and their commitment to participating in clinical HIV/AIDS research. We will not rest until we have ended the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Source: The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)---part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland---is responsible for HIV/AIDS research.  The NIH is part of the U.S.Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).