Do We Really Need a Reminder of What the AIDS Crisis Was Like? |
Do We Really Need a Reminder of What the AIDS Crisis Was Like?
Ms. Szalavitz is a contributing Opinion writer who covers addiction and public policy.
In 2003, a few weeks after Kamaria Laffrey, then 21 years old, gave birth to her first child, she received a phone call instructing her to immediately contact her doctor. The physician revealed that routine testing had found that Ms. Laffrey was H.I.V. positive. Fortunately, her baby was not.
If she’d received the same news a decade earlier, the diagnosis would have been a death sentence. But since the first combination of antiviral drugs was found to be effective in the mid-1990s, H.I.V. infection has........