quotations about AIDS
The stigmatization and the excruciating pains of social alienation have compelled most victims to conceal their status while the malevolent ones continue to distribute the virus free of charge to unsuspecting men and women.
OCHE OTORKPA
The Unseen Terrorist
The battle against AIDS is not a last decade issue. It's going to be the next decade issue. We need to finish the job, get new companies, new interest. It's kind of annoying and sometimes upsetting that these global health issues can become creatures of fashion. People think Aids is done -- it's not done.
BONO
The Irish Times, January 24, 2016
Our society has made it extremely difficult for those living with the virus to declare their status.
OCHE OTORKPA
The Unseen Terrorist
There is no story in global health as transformative, awe-inspiring, and yet as tragic as the AIDS pandemic. The disease was unknown only a generation ago -- a medical curiosity among young gay men in New York and San Francisco in June 1981. Within a few short years, AIDS could be found on every continent, enveloping the world to become one of the most devastating pandemics in human history. It has caused untold human suffering, social disintegration, and economic destruction.... The socio-political response was, at best, denial, ignorance, and silence. Ronald Reagan, US President at the time, did not utter the word "AIDS" in public until 1986. At worst, it was social marginalisation, discrimination, and punishment. People were blamed for their own suffering and criminalised for their behaviour. The fear, pain, and despair faced by people living with AIDS and their loved ones cannot be overstated.
LAWRENCE O. GOSTIN
"AIDS: How Far the World has Come and How Far it Needs To Go to Get to Zero", Huffington Post, February 17, 2016
It is imperative for us to understand that being HIV positive is not a death sentence. The eradication of HIV/AIDS like any other disease will require a collective response.
OCHE OTORKPA
The Unseen Terrorist
We owe it to Ryan to make sure that the fear and ignorance that chased him from his home and his school will be eliminated. We owe it to Ryan to open our hearts and our minds to those with AIDS. We owe it to Ryan to be compassionate, caring and tolerant toward those with AIDS, their families and friends. It's the disease that's frightening, not the people who have it.
RONALD REAGAN
"We Owe It to Ryan", Washington Post, January 11, 1990
Pope Francis has said that artificial contraception may be used to protect against the Zika virus. But the church will not do the same for Aids.... Why is "permission" being granted to safeguard against one virus, Zika, but not against HIV and Aids? While Zika is horrific, how many lives has Aids claimed and ruined, including babies who are born HIV-positive? A disgrace, then, that, in all these decades, the issue has been persistently dodged by the Vatican.
BARBARA ELLEN
"If condoms are OK for Zika, why not Aids, Pope Francis?", The Guardian, February 20, 2016
We're all going to go crazy, living this epidemic every minute, while the rest of the world goes on out there, all around us, as if nothing is happening, going on with their own lives and not knowing what it's like, what we're going through. We're living through war, but where they're living it's peacetime, and we're all in the same country.
LARRY KRAMER
The Normal Heart
For so many people, AIDS is merely an idea -- something people from another generation suffered from.
MATTHEW TERRELL
"Review: 'Art AIDS America' retrospectively shows us the face of an epidemic", Arts Atlanta, February 25, 2016
The fight against HIV/AIDS is a decades-long global battle which claimed the lives of 34 million people by the end of 2015. Yet the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that only 54 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS are aware of their infection.
STEPHEN ABBOTT PUGH
"Journalists have crucial role as focus of AIDS funding shifts", International Journalists' Network, February 18, 2016
I'm an HIV-positive man who has done the unthinkable. I'm living my life. I'm having a ball.
COLE TUCKER
attributed, Queer Quotes: On Coming Out and Culture, Love and Lust, Politics and Pride
On December 22,1986, finding I was body positive, I set myself a target: I would disclose my secret and survive Margaret Thatcher. I did. Now I have set my sights on the millennium and a world where we are all equal.
DEREK JARMAN
At Your Own Risk
AIDS destroys families, decimates communities and, particularly in the poorest areas of the world, threatens to destabilize the social, cultural, and economic fabric of entire nations.
RABBI DAVID SAPERSTEIN
attributed, Changing the Present
Despite all the grim statistics, a solution to the AIDS epidemic is very much in sight, if we only command the necessary resources, have the dedication, and cut through the ideological barriers.
WILLIAM LYNCH III
"The War on AIDS Is Not Over", The Huffington Post, May 5, 2014
Since the midnineties, public concern in the United States about the AIDS pandemic has continued to decline, even as the disease continues to spread. The number of Americans who consider AIDS the most urgent health problem facing the nation dropped from 44 percent in 1995 to 6 percent in 2009. One reason, surely, is that AIDS has become less and less a white disease and more and more a disease associated with people of color. Globally, fewer than half the people afflicted with AIDS are receiving treatment, and in light of recent budget cuts reducing AIDS expenditures, that number is likely to decline further.
MARTIN DUBERMAN
Hold Tight Gently
I think racism is a bottom-line AIDS issue. And I think homophobia is a bottom-line AIDS issue, and sexism and class issues and all of this. I think that we are not going to solve the AIDS epidemic unless we deal with these issues, and vice versa.
ANN NORTHROP
attributed, Queer Quotes: On Coming Out and Culture, Love and Lust, Politics and Pride
In the South Bronx in 1990, you'd walk into a ward -- and we did have open wards in Bronx-Lebanon Hospital at that point -- and it was just full of people dying from AIDS. We did not have a way to treat them. We could do little things. We could delay death. Then, after that, we could help people die. Now, when I go to Rwanda, I can walk into a ward and it's the same thing: full of people who are dying of AIDS, both women and men, in separate wards, obviously. One difference is that, in Rwanda, there are two people in a bed.
KATHRYN ANASTOS
interview, The Body: The Complete HIV/AIDS Resource
Thirty-five years into the AIDS epidemic, it is clear that we need much better ways to prevent transmission of HIV. As HIV vaccine research progresses, the use of preventive antiretroviral medications delivered via daily pills, bimonthly injections, and vaginal rings hold the potential to dramatically reduce HIV transmission. The end of AIDS is possible, we just need to keep up the fight and continue to support innovative research.
KENNETH H. MAYER
"New tools to fight AIDS", Boston Globe, February 20, 2016
When AIDS was at its most brutal, frightening, my-God-what-are-we-going-to-do era, that was when vampire stories and stories about blood and trust swept the literary world.
SUSAN BRIGHT
"Bright Ideas", Boston Phoenix, February 11, 2005
AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals. It is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.
JERRY FALWELL
"The Legacy of Falwell's Bully Pulpit", Washington Post, May 19, 2007