by Nomad
Ronald Reagan's legacy has taken a lot of criticism over the years about his lame response to the AIDS crisis. How much of that criticism is based on fact and how much on perception? Reagan himself might not have been the real problem, but the company he kept most certainly had an impact on his way of dealing with the emerging epidemic.
Association and Contact
On July 5, 1981, less than six months after Ronald Reagan took office, an article appeared in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). The newsletter is a weekly report distributed by the CDC written by University of California-Los Angeles Dr. Michael Gottlieb and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Dr. Wayne Shandera. In it, an article detailed the unusual cases of a new type of pneumonia which specifically seemed to target gay males.
According to the report, the cases suggested “some association between some aspect of a homosexual lifestyle or disease acquired through sexual contact.” The article was to mark the first public announcement of the disease which became known as AIDS and later HIV infection.
