The president recognizes that funding global health is good for national security, domestic health and global diplomacy. Consequently, President Obama has steadily increased funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which was created by President Bush and has strong bipartisan support.
We must encourage people to get educated, to get tested, to get involved in the fight against AIDS.
Popular ideas about AIDS are based on a hypothesis that does not stand up to scientific scrutiny.
I went to Africa without the perspective of a balance between teaching people the truth, which has been my calling, and helping people who have physical problems, like AIDS and orphans and hunger.
When I started out, no one would talk to young people about HIV or AIDS. I looked around and radio looked like a powerful way to shape culture in a healthy way.
I’m the cofounder of Keep a Child Alive. We provide medicine for families affected by HIV and AIDS in places like Africa and India.
There’s no question that the gay movement would not be as far along as it is without AIDS. But how can there be any other issue in the face of death, possible extinction?
Watching AIDS play its evil game of give and take has made me understand why lobbying for increased research funding should be an urgent priority – not only for the gay community but for us all.
My work with AIDS patients started right at the beginning of the epidemic, totally unplanned and spontaneous, as all my work had proceeded in the previous two decades, if it were not already my whole life-style! In the early eighties, we knew very little about this peculiar disease.
The greatest grand challenge for any scientist is discovering how to prevent the spread of HIV and finding the cure or an effective vaccine for AIDS.
The global commitment for the Sustainable Development Goals offers a profound opportunity to tackle the structural, social, and economic changes needed to end AIDS.
When my lover Hubert Sorin was dying of AIDS, he was always trying to fix me up – posthumously, as it were – with the cute busboy at the hotel.
I fight AIDS because it’s a killer disease, destroys the human race in all fields.
China is certainly an important player in the global economy, and a widespread AIDS epidemic would threaten that growth.
Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?
AIDS today is not a death sentence. It can be treated as a chronic illness, or a chronic disease.
The AIDS virus is not more powerful than God.
It’s very hard to argue against the message that we all have AIDS. It’s not hard to make the case that we all have been affected, both culturally and spiritually.
The first reports of AIDS closely followed the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, whose ‘family values’ agenda and alliance with Christian conservatives associated AIDS with deviance and sin.
A lot of people in my world – in the acting world – have either lost friends to Aids or live with HIV because its origin in our culture, in New York for instance, was in the gay community.
In the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, there were many gay men who were unable to come out about the fact that their lovers were ill, A, and then dead, B. They were unable to get access to the hospital to see their lover, unable to call their parents and say, ‘I have just lost the love of my life.’
To me, celebrity doesn’t mean a whole lot unless you’re willing to use it. So I wanted to use it in a different way, with my AIDS work, the human rights stuff for the gay and lesbian community and the speaking I do.
I came to N.Y.C. in 1988 and got very involved with Act Up. I also started making movies, including two very gay shorts, ‘Vaudeville’ and ‘Lady.’ It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and New York City was both dying and very alive at the same time.
I enjoy being the messenger for God in terms of letting people know about HIV and AIDS.
I have serious hearing loss. I’m challenged if I don’t have my hearing aids in.
This AIDS stuff is pretty scary. I hope I don’t get it.
I go to Malawi twice a year. It’s where two of my children were adopted from, and I have a lot of projects there that I go and check up on and children who I look after. It’s sort of a commitment that I’ve made to this country and the hundreds of thousands of children there who have been orphaned by AIDS.
I asked my body if it was going to die or not from AIDS. And it said ‘no.’ I sort of paid attention to that.
AIDS is such a scary thing and it’s also the kind of thing that you think won’t happen to you. It can happen to you and it’s deadly serious.
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion… It’s, what, a few months in Iraq.
From 1989 to 2000, I was focusing in on my children. I hadn’t realized the world had changed a lot. AIDS had happened, for starters, and so many people in the arts died or were affected.
In Africa through the 1990s, with notable exceptions in Senegal and Uganda, nearly all the ruling powers denied they had a problem with AIDS.
It’s an interesting line that I walk. The AIDS crisis has done a lot for my songs and made them proliferate, and my songs have contributed a lot to that cause as well.
Today the biggest problem in caring for those with AIDS is no longer mainly a medical or scientific problem. The crisis is access to affordable drugs.
The media in America is not covering American AIDS very much. They’re covering African AIDS as if somehow miraculously it’s all stopped here. Well, it hasn’t, and the one thing they’re not saying about Africa is that all those people are going to die; there’s no way these people can be saved – none.
The school I was going to said they had no guidelines for a person with AIDS.
All of my peers died of AIDS, and I have no one to celebrate my past or my journey, or to help me pass down stories to the next generation. We lost an entire generation of storytellers with HIV.
My name is Ryan White. I am sixteen years old. I have hemophilia, and I have AIDS.
The fight against AIDS in China is already well underway. The Chinese government and other funders are providing major support, and they’ll continue to bear primary responsibility for delivering prevention and treatment.
‘Longtime Companion’ was really the first movie that I know of that addressed the problem of AIDS. This was back in the ’80s that we did this.
Parents want their children to excel, callers to a victims’ hot line want help, and sick people want to get well. Offering aids is like providing an alarm clock: it may help people get to an appointment on time, but no one is forcing them to use it.
AIDS is an absolutely tragic disease. The argument about AIDS’ being some kind of divine retribution is crap.
It’s important not to lose sight of the fact people of all sorts are still putting themselves at risk. It happens to straight and gay, single and married. I have never been comfortable thinking of AIDS as something that ‘other people’ get.
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.
The world has been experiencing a whole pattern of auto-destruction, whether in environmental disasters like Chernobyl or health disasters like AIDS.
The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted. It mutates furiously, it has decoys to evade the immune system, it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it, and it quickly hides itself in your genome.
For me, ‘Angels in America’ is not really about AIDS. For me, it’s a metaphor for anybody who is struggling with serious illness or having to face their own demise. All of the characters face some form of destruction in themselves.
I have had lots of friends who’ve been affected by Aids and a very good friend of mine, Oscar Moore, died of Aids and I was with him in his last year quite a bit. And of course he was a man living in a very rich culture with a wealthy family who was able to afford health care.
My mom’s best friend growing up was diagnosed with AIDS, and he basically raised me when my mom was launching her business. Although I didn’t understand at the time what HIV or AIDS was, I knew that’s what he passed away from.
I was destined to work with dying patients. I had no choice when I encountered my first AIDS patient. I felt called to travel some 250,000 miles each year to hold workshops that helped people cope with the most painful aspects of life, death and the transition between the two.
As for AIDS, it’s a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it’s a quarter; after that it’s a childhood disease.
It will kill four times as many Americans as AIDS will over the next decade. I feel that what ever kind of disability God has given me, as an entertainer and as a public figure, it is so I can be a representative for others.
My first AIDS campaign was in 1985. There was this dark cloud, everybody was socially inspired – we hadn’t seen social consciousness like that since the ’60s – but most people were talking about hunger in Africa. Nobody was talking about this really ominous circumstance here in the U.S. because of this fear of stigma.
