And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

by Randy Shilts

Biggar tested blood he drew in the remote Zairian bush country north of Kinshasa and found that 12 percent of local people were infected with HTLV-III.

A remote tribe may have harbored the virus. With the rapid urbanization of this region after colonization, the virus may have only recently reached the major cities, such as Kinshasa. From Africa, the virus jumped to Europe,

Haiti, through administrators imported from that island to work in Zaire throughout the 1970s. From Europe and Haiti, the virus quickly made its debut in the United States, returning to Europe in the early 1980s through gay tourists.

Of course, nobody spoke the A-word aloud from the podium of either convention. The entire subject continued to be embarrassing for most people in the mainstream of society; this uneasiness was something that Republicans and Democrats shared.

Later, everybody agreed the baths should have been closed sooner; they agreed health education should have been more direct and more timely. And everybody also agreed blood banks should have tested blood sooner, and that a search for the AIDS virus should have been started sooner, and that scientists should have laid aside their petty intrigues. Everybody subsequently agreed that the news media should have offered better coverage of the epidemic much earlier, and that the federal government should have done much, much more. By the time everyone agreed to all this, however, it was too late.

The spread of AIDS in Africa most likely outpaced the spread in any other region in the world, although determining this with any degree of accuracy remained problematical. African governments continued to be reluctant to acknowledge that the epidemic even existed within their borders. Therefore, the extent of the problem was most obvious in Europe, where one in six AIDS patients was African. These cases could be traced to eighteen sub-Saharan African nations. Two-thirds of the African-linked AIDS cases in Europe, however, came from one country, Zaire, and 11 percent came from the nearby Congo. Belgian scientists reported only one major risk factor in these nations: heterosexual promiscuity.

the first person in the United States known to have been infected with the AIDS virus. The first documented carrier was not a gay man, they said, but a San Francisco prostitute.

“I’ve seen a lot of viruses in my day, and I’ve come to develop a profound respect for this one,” Francis concluded. “There aren’t very many viruses in the history of man that kill one-tenth of the people they infect. We need to start thinking about controlling this one.”

Although the gay AIDS activists were fond of lecturing people that “AIDS is not a gay disease,” they had in fact treated the epidemic almost solely as a gay disease, the private property of a community that would base public health policy on its own political terms.

Lawrence calmly laid out his projection that the mean incubation period for the AIDS virus was 5.5 years. Some people, he added, would not get AIDS until 14 years after their infection. These figures meant that the typical person diagnosed with AIDS in April 1985 was infected in October 1979. The huge number of people infected with the virus in 1982, 1983, and 1984, when the virus was far more prevalent, would not show AIDS symptoms until the late 1980s. Some people getting infected at the time of the conference, meanwhile, would not come down with the disease until the turn of the next century.

the virus was present in the blood of 4.5 percent of study subjects in 1978, 20 percent in 1980, and 67 percent by late 1984. In other words, they noted, a substantial number of gay men were infected with the virus years before people even knew the problem existed.

“Gay radicals are holding public policy hostage to their politics,” he complained. “We need to stop this disease, and we’re not being allowed to.”