Phill Wilson thought he'd never work again. At times, in fact, he thought he'd never see another sunrise.
He had been living with HIV since 1980 and with full-blown AIDS since 1990. By 1995, he had barely survived bouts with pneumonia and pericarditis, an inflammation of the membrane enclosing the heart. He had seen the disease's progression as he watched countless friends get sick and die. "It's like you're in a queue, and the people in front of you are going through a turnstile," says Wilson, now 48. "Every time someone goes through, you feel that much closer to the front of the line. And you know the next infection is likely to be more horrible than the previous one."
Just in the nick of time for him, medical science produced a miracle--the three-drug cocktail, including new protease inhibitors, called antiretroviral therapy that, since 1996, has prolonged and enhanced thousands of lives. By 1999, Wilson was well enough to get back to work, so he founded the Black AIDS Institute."I looked at what had changed in the intervening years," he recalls, "and to my great disappointment, there had not been a lot of progress in fighting AIDS in the black community." He saw that, in the public mind, AIDS had been transformed. "This epidemic came about in 1980, and that epidemic was perceived as a gay epidemic. And then following the protease inhibitors, the epidemic came to be seen as a global epidemic," he says. But most Americans didn't consider the United States as part of that worldwide disaster. "There was a shifting of view. We went from being internally focused on AIDS in young, white gay men, to AIDS in Africa, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. But through all of that, this constant epidemic in people of color in America has been ignored. The epidemic is having a devastating effect in black communities."
| Continue Susan Brink's U.S. News & World Report article "AIDS: darkening in America"
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