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UNM Professor Recounts the Horror of AIDS Epidemic

By Jennifer Sawayda

2007 Article Links

Benefits of ASM Membership
Challenges of Writing
Double Epidemic
Fifth Disease
Fish With Hormonal Imbalances
Frankel Photos
Frankel Talk
Hep C Meds
Horror of AIDS
Hantavirus in New Mexico
Juan Reyna
Nature or Nurture
Nosocomial Infections are a Red Flag
Open Eyes to Science
Pandemic Flu Plans
Polio
Project ECHO
Typhoid Mary
West Nile Prevention
Zoo Diseases

Imagine starting out the day with news that another one of your friends has died from a mysterious illness. In the hospitals, nurses are afraid to get close to the sick. Food services will not enter patients’ rooms in fear that the pathogens could spread throughout the air. The illness is a death sentence for anyone who catches it.

This may sound like a scene from a horror movie, but for Jack Trujillo, a Creative Writing professor at the University of New Mexico, it was a reality. Trujillo lived in San Francisco during the peak of the AIDS epidemic in America.

“I was terrified. I got up every morning and checked to see if there were bruises I didn’t have the night before [an indication of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare cancer that developed in many people with AIDS],” Trujillo says. “Every time you coughed or lost weight, you worried.”

Although many Americans today have a basic understanding of the effects of AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome), few of us younger Americans can picture the sheer panic that swept through the nation when AIDS first appeared.

“It was a time of fear and confusion,” Trujillo says. “No one knew what the truth was. Every idea, thought, and invention became fact.”

Trujillo was first affected by AIDS when his best friend contracted human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS. Trujillo recalls the fear that was associated with his friend’s illness.

“It was hard to get medical services for him,” Trujillo says. “At first the staff would try to stay away. People were just scared to death.”

Since there was no medication to treat AIDS, death occurred shortly after developing symptoms. The virus spread so rapidly through cities like New York and San Francisco that deaths from AIDS became a common occurrence in certain communities.

“It was often fatal after six months,” Trujillo says. “I seemed to know one person a week that was dying.”

At first, believing that AIDS only affected gay men and drug users, many people did not take the disease seriously. Haitians were another group who were considered to be at high-risk for AIDS.

“The people hit were Haitians, gay men, drug abusers. Nobody thought it mattered,” Trujillo says.

Ideas began to change when other people, including children with hemophilia, an inherited disease that affects normal blood clotting, contracted the virus. Once people began to acknowledge that the disease could strike potentially anyone, the country began spending more money on HIV/AIDS research. Since that time many medications have been created and approved to fight HIV.

Although the AIDS panic may have lessened somewhat, AIDS itself has not died down. It continues to claim millions of lives each year. Trujillo leaves us with a word of caution about the nature of viruses like HIV:

“Viruses know no boundaries, and they don’t need passports. An epidemic can get out of control easily and become worldwide.”