AIDS at 30: A History

This title examines the heroic efforts to pinpoint the cause of HIV/AIDS. It shows how doctors, researchers, and other professionals have struggled to find a cure. It reveals the medical science behind the most terrifying global epidemic of our time. Society was not prepared in 1981 for the appearance of a new infectious disease, but we have since learned that emerging and re-emerging diseases will continue to challenge humanity. "AIDS at 30: A History" is the first history of HIV/AIDS written for a general audience that emphasizes the medical response to this epidemic. This book approaches the AIDS virus from philosophical and intellectual perspectives in the history of medical science. Forgoing the usual narrative about who 'discovered' the AIDS virus, it discusses the process of scientific discovery, scientific evidence, and how laboratories found the cause of AIDS and developed therapeutic interventions. Similarly, this book places AIDS as the first infectious disease to be recognized simultaneously worldwide as a single phenomenon. After years of believing that vaccines and antibiotics would keep deadly epidemics away, researchers, doctors, patients, and the public were forced to abandon the arrogant assumption that they had conquered infectious diseases. By presenting an accessible discussion of the history of HIV/AIDS and analyzing how aspects of society advanced or hindered the response to the disease, this book shows how medicine identifies and evaluates new infectious diseases quickly and what factors limit medicine's response.