June 5 this year marked 30 years since the US-based Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a cluster of unusual infections in Los Angeles. This report has been dubbed by some as the ‘beginning of AIDS’ but is more appropriately the first widespread awareness of AIDS in the US. That was June 5, 1981 and by 1986, the actual virus was named Human Immunodeficiency Virus or HIV. Geography proved to be no barrier and in Australia, cases were being reported as early as 1983.
Mark Reid, the manager of diverse sexuality health promotion services at the WA AIDS Council first heard about AIDS through the media and recalls the community’s reaction in 1983/84.
‘GAGS [Gay Activities Group Services] … found out about it and they called a community meeting to talk about this thing that was happening and what we should do about it,’ he said.
‘There needed to be some sort of response in the community to get information out, so people were making the right decisions about staying healthy.
Gay-related Immune Deficiency or GRID was one of the first names given to the virus; Reid said the name made sense at the time.
‘When it was first seen in the communities at the very beginning, it was almost exclusively gay men who were becoming infected and presenting with opportunistic infections,’ he said.
‘It didn’t stay GRID for very long and made the move when they saw it was actually in more than just the gay men’s community; it had crossed into a range of other communities.’
Before 1985, there was limited support available in WA for people living with HIV. Under the guidance of Professor Roger Dawkins, a team at the Royal Perth Hospital began working during the early 1980s, playing a significant role in WA’s response to the global challenge.
‘Pre-’85, it was very much just some community people coming together to talk about how we move forward,’ he said.
In 1985, the WA AIDS Council was created: a service to provide an education- prevention strategy run by the community to fill the vacuum left by medical-specific services. Rates of new cases of HIV and AIDS were not collected in Australia till about 1987; the same year also recorded the highest annual rate of new cases of HIV nationwide, over 7,000 cases in total.
‘There was an uncertainty about what this new disease was all about and how it would manifest,’ he said.
‘In ’85,’86, ’87, we did start to see people who were presenting with serious illness and they were dying – it was happening.’
AIDS councils around the country had a message and the message was safe-sex. Condoms were spruiked as the best line of defence while health promoters were urging gay men against the use of Amyl Nitrite or poppers.
‘It was a challenge but it wasn’t that difficult,’ Reid said when talking about promoting condom use.
‘In Australia, we were able to stop the predictions of the waves of the epidemic … in the very beginning there was this notion that every 12 months there would be three-fold increase of men being newly diagnosed.’
‘We basically stalled the major increases that were supposed to happen in the community by getting the message out effectively and people taking that message on board.
In 2008, UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS) praised Australia’s response to HIV/AIDS. A statement from Australia’s progress report read: ‘The Australian response to HIV/AIDS has undoubtedly contributed to the comparatively low rates of the disease in Australia.’
Looking back over the past 30 years, Reid said perceptions around HIV had changed; back then it was an unknown quantity and there was a real fear surrounding it.
‘There was a lot not known about it so there was a lot of fear around it and whilst there still is stigma discrimination against people with HIV exist in the community, there’s not as much fear as there used to be.’
Benn Dorrington
