The Plague With No Name - June 5, 1981

About this episode

The episode discusses the CDC's pivotal announcement on AIDS and the complex societal response that followed.

On June 5, 1981, the CDC published five paragraphs that changed American history, the first official documentation of what we now call AIDS. What followed was not a simple story of heroes and villains, but a collision between science, fear, politics, stigma, and extraordinary community courage. Reagan's own Surgeon General eventually became one of the clearest voices for confronting the crisis honestly. And the communities most devastated by the disease built, with their own hands, the public health infrastructure that institutions were too slow to provide.

People in this episode

Host: Richard G Backus

Topics covered

• AIDS
• public health
• community courage
• politics
• stigma
• science
• history

Keywords

• AIDS
• CDC
• public health
• Reagan
• Surgeon General
• community
• politics
• stigma
• history

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: CDC

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