Thirty years of AIDS

Georgia Health News: An Epic Battle — 30 Years Of Fighting AIDS
Thirty years ago next month, the CDC released the first report on a mysterious disease among gay men in Los Angeles. The AIDS epidemic had begun. It has since claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Americans and is currently ravaging Africa. ... The Ponce de Leon Center, operated by Grady [Health System] and with medical staff from Emory's Division of Infectious Diseases ... serves 5,000 patients, all of whom have an AIDS diagnosis, said Dr. Wendy Armstrong, the clinic's medical director. It's the largest single HIV clinic in the Southeast. About half the patients have no insurance, with most of the rest relying on government Medicaid or Medicare coverage, she said. In this country, "the Southeast is the epicenter of the disease,"' Armstrong said (Miller, 5/16).

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This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.