With any luck, the myth of Patient Zero being responsible for HIV/AIDS in the US will finally be completely put to rest. Gaétan Dugas may not be a household name for most, but he’s the man who has largely been blamed for HIV/AIDS in the United States. Dugas was a gay...
Today is World AIDS Day, an annual day of remembrance and reflection on the global AIDS crisis held since 1988. Overshadowed this year by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, we should keep in mind...
Earlier this spring, I had a chance to talk to Mark Dybul, the head of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria and former administrator of PEPFAR, the U.S. bilateral AIDS program. At the...
Sunday, December 1st was World AIDS Day, the annual reminder of the state of the epidemic, a way to focus attention on a problem that is perhaps less visible than it was two or three years but not...
With the Oscars fast approaching, one documentary How to Survive a Plague is a likely winner (though may lose out to my second favorite documentary of the year Searching for Sugar Man).  How to Survive a Plague is, as I described in my earlier review, an emotionally redolent account of ACT UP's mobilization to move the U.S. government and the pharmaceuticals industry to bring life-extending AIDS drugs from the labs to market and into bodies. Josh Barro makes the case that the reason why ACT UP succeeded is because they made concrete demands, which echoes the argument Ethan Kapstein and I...
Today is World AIDS Day, an annual opportunity to take stock of the state of the epidemic. Despite a decade of incredible mobilization of finance for and visibility of the AIDS pandemic, UNAIDS estimated that the number of new infections last year 2.5 million still far outstripped the 1.4 million people who received treatment for the first time. There has been some good news. 8 million of the 15 million people thought sick enough to need treatment now have it, up from 200,000 in the early 2000s. New infections of HIV and deaths from AIDS have dropped significantly in a number of countries....
I am putting the finishing touches on a new book manuscript on social movements and market transformations with my co-author Ethan Kapstein. In the process of researching that book which focuses on the global AIDS treatment advocacy movement, we tried to get our hands on any relevant material. We became aware of two important documentaries that have just been released, one is David France’s How to Survive a Plague which captures ACT UP’s mobilization for AIDS treatment in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. The other is Dylan Mohan Gray’s Fire in the Blood, which covers the global...