The AIDS Pandemic

A virus that had crossed from chimpanzees to humans in central Africa decades earlier surfaced in 1981 as clusters of a rare pneumonia. HIV has killed more than 40 million people, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, where at the peak it cut life expectancy in some countries by twenty years and left millions of children orphaned. Because of who it first visibly affected in wealthy countries, the early response was slow and moralized, and activists had to force both research funding and drug access. Antiretroviral drugs turned it from a death sentence into a manageable condition — first for those who could pay, and years later for those who could not.