Mosaic: How HIV became a matter of international security
“…AIDS became the first epidemic in modern history to morph beyond a topic of public health into an issue of national and even international security. Without collaboration between countries, between scientists and military personnel, between industry and government, the disease would have claimed more than the 35 million lives it has to date. … By the early 1980s, diseases that ravaged the human population seemed like they might become a thing of the past. Smallpox had been eradicated worldwide by 1980; vaccination campaigns during the 1960s and 70s meant that diseases like polio, mumps, and measles affected far fewer people. ‘People were talking about conquering infectious disease once and for all,’ says Joshua Michaud, the associate director of global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. … But when AIDS was discovered in 1981, that illusion was shattered. ‘We had a lot of magic bullets, we had technical fixes to everything. Then HIV happened,’ Michaud says…” (Ossola, 5/16).