Forbes September 16, 2024
In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, a mysterious illness spread through America’s overlooked communities, mainly affecting intravenous drug users and homosexual men.
The disease, which caused a sudden and devastating collapse of the immune system, was unlike anything doctors had seen before. Patients arrived at hospitals with rare infections like Kaposi’s sarcoma and fungal pneumonia.
But despite the rising number of cases, public health officials remained silent for years. Few Americans saw it as a national emergency, especially since the disease seemed confined to society’s fringes, at least initially.
By the time the government and public fully grasped the threat in 1986—following Dr. C. Everett Koop’s “Surgeon General’s Report on AIDS”—tens of thousands of Americans had already died.
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