Re:Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)
by theorique on Friday July 05, 2013 @06:20PM
(#5997013)
Was HIV even identified in the late 1970s and early 80s though? I thought it was identified as a consequence of looking at the causes of the AIDS epidemic.
The virus was discovered in 1983, but knowledge of the "gay cancer" was around in the late 70s. I shouldn't have said "HIV research" there, but rather, "AIDS research". The medical world's interest in AIDS was pretty limited until it started to break out of the marginalized populations of gay men and drug users.
In other words, it's not as if the drug was invented in response to the AIDS crisis. Once the NIH/NCI made AIDS research a priority, it was a rather straightforward matter to start testing known anti-retroviral drugs. One can reasonably argue that if the government had made HIV research a priority in the late 70s and early 80s, the effective treatments would have been found before the epidemic exploded (for example, contrast to SARS or bird flu, where the index patients are chased down and isolated, and immunological research begins before there are even tens of thousands of patients.)