National Minority AIDS Council Building Healthier Communities

Confusion about the transmission of AIDS continues. Early in the year, the CDC publishes research stating that the disease is transmitted through intimate homosexual contact. The possibility of transmission through heterosexual sex is not mentioned. National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers are similarly confused, rejecting a proposal to study whether women can contract the virus.

 

The disease still does not have an official name, with the CDC referring to it by the symptoms it presented, such as lymphadenopathy (swollen glands), or the name of the epidemic's internal taskforce, KSOI.

More often, the names reference the disease's initial occurrence in homosexual men, most notably gay cancer. A reference to "gay compromise syndrome" in a letter that appeared in The Lancet helped give rise to the acronym GRID, for gay-related immune deficiency. This term is commonly used in the media to refer to the epidemic, but quickly is abandoned as reports of infections of heterosexual men and women, as well as children, come to light.

In the June 18, 1982 edition of MMWR, the report, A Cluster of Kaposi's Sarcoma and Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia among Homosexual Male Residents of Los Angeles and Range Counties, California, concludes that cases among a group of gay men in Southern California may have been the result of a sexually transmitted infectious agent.

In the July 9, 1982 edition of MMWR, Opportunistic Infections and Kaposi's Sarcoma among Haitians in the United States reports the appearance of the disease in Haitian communities and hemophiliac patients nationwide. The report led commentators to speculate that the epidemic began in Haiti, while worried parents removed their children from hemophiliac summer camps.

July 27, 1982
At a meeting in Washington, DC, the CDC announces that the disease would be referred to as AIDS ("acquired immune deficiency syndrome").

October 1982
Though there are nearly 1,000 known deaths in the United States alone to AIDS, the Reagan Administration has yet to speak on the subject.

In an October press conference, White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes
(right, with Reagan) joked about "gay cancer", particularly during an exchange with White House press and Baltimore radio correspondent Charles Lester Kinsolving:

Kinsolving: Does the president, does anybody in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?

Speakes: I don't think so. I don't think there's been any--

Kinsolving: Nobody knows?

Speakes: There has been no personal experience here, Lester.

Kinsolving: No, I mean, I thought you were keeping--

Speakes: I checked thoroughly with [Reagan's personal physician] Dr. Ruge this morning, and he's had no -- (laughter) -- no patients suffering from AIDS or whatever it is.

Despite the Administration's lack of interest and resistance, Congressman Henry Waxman (left) held the first of many Congressional hearings on the disease. His work helped enact several key pieces of AIDS-related legislation, including the Public Health Emergencies Act of 1983; the Health Research Extension Act of 1984; the Preventive Health Services Amendments of 1984; and the Health Research Extension Act of 1985. Additional funding for the CDC and NIH were secured to fund AIDS research.

October 18, 1982

ABC News airs a report about the spread of the new epidemic, noting new cases being reported in almost every major city in the United States: New York, NY; Washington, DC; Newark, NJ; San Francisco, CA; Houston, TX; Miami, FL; and Los Angeles, CA. View the report by clicking here.

 

The weekly Bay Area Reporter publishes its first cover story on AIDS. Prepared by the GMHC Committee, the article advises, "It is the number of different sexual encounters that may increase risk, not sex itself."

By the end of 1982, cases of a disease called "slim" are reported in Uganda.

In the United States, the MMWR reports that several pediatric AIDS in California suggest a direct link between blood transfusions and AIDS transmissions. As the number of people impacted increased, so did public interest was in the epidemic.

GMHC establishes the first AIDS hotline, as well as a new Patient Services division. The latter houses the Buddy Program which provides peer support services to people living with AIDS. At the same time, the City and County of San Francisco, working closely with the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, Shanti Project and others, develop the "San Francisco Model of Care" for AIDS patients, which emphasizes home and community-based services.

The CDC adds "female sexual partners of men with AIDS" as a fifth risk group for infection, following the four major "identified risk factors" of male homosexuality, intravenous drug use, Haitian origin and hemophilia A.

The inclusion of "Haitian origin" as a risk factor for AIDS extended stigma to an entirely new population in the United States, and led to allegations of racism against the CDC.

The stigma around AIDS intensifies throughout the year, with reports of landlords evicting tenants diagnosed with the disease and Social Security Administration personnel interviewing people living with AIDS over the telephone, rather than in person.

 

The National AIDS Network (NAN), headed by National Minority AIDS Council's future Executive Director, Paul Kawata, convenes the first National AIDS Forum. Gilberto Girard, one of the founders of NMAC, serves as NAN's head of minority affairs.

 

The first safe sex pamphlet Can We Talk... is published in San Francisco, by the Sister's of Perpetual Indulgence.

There are 853 known deaths from AIDS worldwide, 466 of which occur in the U.S. An additional 1,201 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with AIDS.