April 23 marks 30 years since the U.S. announced the discovery of what causes AIDS: a retrovirus called HTLV-III, later renamed HIV. At their 1984 press conference, in the face of one of the world’s most terrifying medical epidemics, Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler and virologist Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute projected scientists would be able to produce an AIDS vaccine within two years.
“That turned out to be totally incorrect,” Heckler told PBS in 2006. “But at that time, we did not know that the replication of the virus would be so difficult — and it still is a problem.”
The new process led to a blood test that could “identify AIDS victims with 100 percent certainty,” Heckler said. At least 80 Americans had already died from HIV-tainted blood transfusions since AIDS cases emerged in 1981.
The ability to produce large quantities of the virus also raised hopes for a vaccine, which government officials said could take at least two years to design.
“If a man thinks that he has eight months to a year to live and you tell him that it’s going to be two or three years before the vaccine comes out, you know, it doesn’t give him a hell of a lot to hold onto,” Bob Cecchi, assistant director of the New York City-based organization Gay Men’s Health Crisis, said at the time.
Researchers today are still trying to find a vaccine to prevent HIV, but advances in treating the infection have led to a steep decline in AIDS deaths. An estimated 1,148,200 Americans are living with HIV, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2010, more than 636,000 Americans had died from AIDS since 1981.
Agencies/Canadajournal