Evolution of HIV/AIDS
EVOLUTION OF HIV/AIDS -- (House of Representatives - June 08, 2006)
Ms. PELOSI. Mr. Speaker, this week we recognize that 25 years ago in San Francisco doctors saw a disease that did not yet have a name with symptoms that hearkened back to the Middle Ages. Some manifestations of the disease were lesions, pneumonia, infections. Within 5 years, we were losing so many, many friends to AIDS that we would often go to two funerals in one day. A whole generation of young people went to more funerals than birthdays. We had too many friends who we held in our arms at the end of their lives that felt like a bag of bones more than the muscular young people they had been. There was so much, first of all, a lack of information and then fear of what became known as HIV/AIDS.
Nineteen years ago, it was this week I came to Congress to be sworn in. And my first sentence was, I am here from San Francisco and I have come to fight against AIDS. Actually, what I said is, Sala Burton sent me here to fight against AIDS. She was my predecessor. People asked me, why would you say that? You don't want to be labeled that way. That is the way AIDS was viewed at the time. But that was why I came here, and I said that from day one.
Because San Francisco had suffered the most, we now had an opportunity to be a model for America and eventually the world, a model for leadership, for community-based solutions, and for intervention. We got to work right away, working with many of my colleagues, Congressman Waxman in the lead on our Banking Committee; Congressmen MCDERMOTT, SCHUMER and FRANK working on our Housing Opportunities With People With Aids; Congresswoman, now Senator, BOXER, again, working with Congressman Waxman creating the Ryan White CARE Act to provide health care and support services for people with HIV and AIDS.
Just as this was all going on, at the very beginning of my tenure in Congress, I measure things that way, a gentleman named Cleve Jones from San Francisco came to me and said we want to have a press conference at your home to announce something called the Names Project. What that would be is that people would make a patch for a giant quilt in honor of a friend, a family member, a loved one who had died of AIDS.
I, being the mother of five and taught to sew in my Catholic school upbringing, said, Sew? Nobody's going to sew. Nobody sews anymore. I have four daughters and one son. I don't sew and I know how to sew. But I was wrong and he was right. And what started that day as us taking a few stitches with then-mayor of San Francisco Art Agnos and Cleve Jones turned into this giant Names Project that has been displayed on the Mall here in Washington. It is indeed a wonder of the world.
Sadly, though, as the quilt grew, so did the recognition of the many lives that were taken or lost from HIV and AIDS.
Next in San Francisco, we created the AIDS Memorial Grove and then designated a national memorial to the thousands of Americans who have died of AIDS. It was really a remarkable thing in our city of San Francisco. Although the numbers were staggering, every diagnosis was an individual one and a personal one, and we had to measure the success of what we were doing as to what it meant to the lives of each person infected with HIV or to the next stage of AIDS.
We recognized that if we were going to have an appropriate response to AIDS, that it had to be international, and thus was started by Paul Boneberg, a person in San Francisco, The International Mobilization Against AIDS. This was many years ago.
Fast forward to now. This year, we have an essential responsibility to continue these efforts by reauthorizing the Ryan White Care Act and then supporting what works by making serious investments in it.
Twenty-five years ago when we heard about the symptoms that would become known as AIDS, and 19 years ago when I first came to Congress, I never thought that we would be standing here today without a cure. Five years from now, on the 30th anniversary, I pray that we can say that AIDS is a terrible, terrible memory; that we have prevented deaths, ended the epidemic, and found a cure. This is especially true not only in our country but throughout the world where many children are affected by the deaths of their parents, being orphaned, and by their own infections as well.
With a group of my colleagues, I visited South Africa and other countries in Africa, but particularly in South Africa we visited the AIDS clinic and saw the important work that was being done there on that continent. It is taking a terrible toll in terms of lives and hopes and dreams and aspirations. I hope that we will soon be able to say that AIDS taught us how to love each other more but that we will never see it again.
Again, I call to the attention of my colleagues the 25th anniversary of the first diagnosis of AIDS, and hope that a cure will be right around the corner.
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