This is such an important point and it reminds me that I visited an AIDS ward in a Detroit hospital ... in 2017! A large portion of a hospital floor was dedicated to caring for people in the end stages of AIDS. I felt like I was flashing back to the worst of the worst. These were men and women of color for the most part, people on the economic margins who either had not received timely treatment for their HIV infection because they didn't get tested, or who had stopped and restarted treatment so many times that the traditional combination cocktails were no longer working.

This is something important to know about HIV infection. The more times you stop treatment, the less effective treatment can become. Until it can become not effective at all.

The long and short of that HIV reality is that people who don't have affordable access to health care are at extraordinary risk for having their HIV infection progress to AIDS and then to death.

Because people living with HIV are usually members of more than one marginalized minority at the same time, very little political will exists to tackle this problem head-on.

PrEP (medication that can prevent HIV infection even when a person is exposed to the virus) is helping. Campaigns to encourage testing and treatment are helping. But in conservative, Republican society, these efforts are largely scorned as encouraging "perversity" and "sin."

Even today in 2024, conservative sentiment about HIV centers around judging people at risk for the virus rather than testing and treating them.

The problem is much worse in some states, primarily in the rural South, but even in Detroit, people are dying of AIDS who absolutely should not be dying. Not in a world with an effective health care system.

But this is where we are right now, and fighting is more required than ever.

Thanks for pointing that out!