For more than 10 years, an HIV diagnosis was seen as a certain death sentence, with over 40,000 people dying from AIDS before the first drug to treat the virus was approved by the Food and Drug Administration and placed on the market.
Infectious disease specialists like Dr. Abraham Verghese, a professor with Stanford University’s department of medicine who treated thousands of patients during the epidemic in the 1980s and early 1990s, became accustomed to losing patients within a matter of weeks or months. But with the help of science, activism from patients and support from the federal government, rapid advancements in treatment and prevention have curbed mortality rates and allowed patients to live longer.
Those same doctors and activists now say decades of progress stand to be undone as cuts to Medicaid through the “big, beautiful bill” and expansive proposed reductions to funding for federal HIV prevention, medications, support services and research threaten to raise infection rates and worsen mortality rates.
“It’s a tragic, short-sighted and politically driven reversal of one of the most effective public health efforts in modern history,” says Dr. Perry N. Halkitis, dean of the Rutgers School of Public Health. To read the full story.