“Don’t buy the hype that the HIV/AIDS pandemic is over for Black people just because of medical advances that have disproportionately benefited white people. Black people and poor people are still acquiring, getting sick, and dying from AIDS in America.”

— Phill Wilson

I have been living with HIV/AIDS for nearly 43 years. It has been a roller coaster for me, my communities, and the world. I’ve lost count of the eulogies’ I’ve delivered, the death beds I’ve sat beside, the hospital rooms I’ve visited, or the number of times I’ve comforted someone after they found out they were HIV positive. I would always tell them, “It was going to be OK,” even when I didn’t believe it.

I know we’ve made a lot of advances since Michael Gottlieb identified the first AIDS cases at UCLA Medical Center in 1981. We have new diagnostic tools, new surveillance tools, new prevention tools, and new treatment tools. We can diagnose someone within the first 24 hours of exposure to the virus. We can identify the pandemic down to the zip code or census tract. We can prevent HIV transmission and HIV acquisition. We made policy advances in access and fought stigma and discrimination. At the very least, I hoped and prayed that we might have learned something—that if something else were to happen, we would know how to handle it. And then COVID-19 happened. It became painfully clear that no one was listening to our pain, tears, screams, grief, and trauma.

The parallels are scary. First, the denial, then the blaming, the slow response, the missed opportunities, and finally, the disproportionate impact on Black, other POC, and poor communities. All the earliest information about how the COVID-19 pathogen was transmitted said that Black, brown, and poor people would be disproportionately impacted. And yet, those in power did not develop strategies targeting those communities. The opposite happened. BIPOC and poor people were designated “essential workers” and sentenced to put themselves in harm’s way to protect the rest of society. And again, the premature declaration of the end of the COVID-19 pandemic places us at continued risk.

Source: For the complete article, thereckoningmag.com

Hattie Caraway succeeded her husband as an Arkansas senator and then won re-election with more votes than her six male opponents combined. She’s pictured at her desk in 1943. Universal History Archive / Universal Images via Getty Images

Hattie Ophelia Wyatt Caraway, a Democrat from Arkansas, becomes the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate. Caraway, born near Bakerville, Tennessee, had been appointed to the Senate two months earlier to fill the vacancy left by her late husband, Thaddeus Horatio Caraway. …read more

image from smithsonianmag.com

On January 11, 1922, 14-year-old Leonard Thompson became the first person to receive an injection of the hormone insulin for Type-1 diabetes—a disease that for millennia had been considered a death sentence for anyone who developed it. The breakthrough would be one of the most consequential in medical history, saving millions of lives.

Diabetes has been recognized as a distinct medical condition for more than 3,000 years, but its exact cause was a mystery until the 20th century. By the early 1920s, many researchers strongly suspected that diabetes was caused by a malfunction in the digestive system related to the pancreas gland, a small organ that sits near the liver. At that time, the only way to treat the fatal disease was through a diet low in carbohydrates and sugar and high in fat and protein. Instead of dying shortly after diagnosis, this diet allowed diabetics to live—for about a year.