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The current number of world-wide cases of HIV infection is estimated at 20 million. In the United States, 362,000 people have died because of AIDS or AIDS related illnesses, while over 581,000 are currently infected. These numbers are startling, but in the United States alone, a country often recognized as the supposed world-leader in health care, between 40,000 and 80,000 new cases of HIV infection are reported each year. This statistic moves beyond startling and into the realm of frightening. The consensus among most physicians, and indeed among most Americans is that AIDS rapidly approaches or has already attained the status of a health crisis. These same people often agree that not enough action is taken to resolve this crisis. Seemingly, a widely recognized crisis of this sort should receive its due attention from all aspects of society, including medicine, biological research, and the government. Unfortunately, AIDS remains an overwhelming crisis because it in fact does not receive its due attention. The reasons behind the lack of attention brought to bear upon the AIDS health crisis involve a number of invariably linked problems in the response to AIDS when it was first discovered. Essentially, the response to AIDS was not unified, and therefore weakened. This early weakness has plagued the entirety of the struggle against the spread of HIV and AIDS since that time of initial discovery. The response to the AIDS crisis was disjointed because of an early lack of knowledge and interest in the disease; because of ethical and political problems concerning the research, diagnosis, and spread of the illness; and, most importantly, because of the flaws inherent in the structure of the public health care system. These difficult issues, present in the early struggle against the disease, have shaped and molded the character of the struggle that was to follow. Similar problems have manifested themselves throughout the history of the cause against AIDS, even in the present day. The earliest research into AIDS and HIV suffered the same difficulties that any new field of research would—a lack of direction. Since so little was known about the disease and its causative factors, a wide variety of research endeavors were undertaken to explore the multitude of possibilities concerning the origin and progression of the illness. This lack of direction stems from the implications of the scientific process, which dictates that upon initial exploratory research, a hypothesis is formulated and then tested to determine its validity. This methodology is taught from the grade school level onward, to individuals participating in even the most rudimentary of science courses. It represents the backbone of modern science by installing a guideline for efficient and thorough research, experimentation, and documentation. In the case of a new field such as AIDS research in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, a certain amount of misdirection and dead-end research is to be expected and even encouraged because of the many paths that this semi-random research reveals. The lack of initial research available makes direction in early AIDS research unfeasible and undesirable. How can science take direction without some initial knowledge to light the way? Without this knowledge, any direction imposed on the research would be misguided, and the situation would rapidly become a case of the blind leading the blind. The true problems in the response to the discovery of AIDS, however, occurred after research illuminated the nature of the disease, providing goals and direction toward which further research could strive. Upon receiving the first reports of Kaposi’s sarcoma, an opportunistic infection common to immuno-suppressed individuals, in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, most physicians viewed the phenomenon as localized to the population of homosexual men.
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