Commentary: thirty years of AIDS in America: a story of infinite hope

Abstract

The year 2011 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the first case reports in the United States of what we now know to be end-stage HIV disease. This chronological milestone provides an opportunity to reflect upon the changing context of the American HIV/AIDS epidemic. Using two seminal documents as a framework, the 1986 Institute of Medicine Report, "Confronting AIDS," and the 2010 National HIV/AIDS Strategy, this descriptive analysis details our accomplishments in addressing the domestic U.S. epidemic and outlines what remains to be done on the long road to eradication of HIV disease. The past three decades have witnessed tremendous biomedical and behavioral advances in preventing, diagnosing, and treating HIV disease. However, to fully realize the promise of these scientific advances, such that we achieve the vision of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy, we must develop effective strategies to surmount a number of salient challenges, including: unbalanced combinations of prevention interventions; programs that are not of adequate scale to achieve population-level results; systems of service delivery that do not function in an integrated fashion; and social and economic structures that increase the vulnerability of populations who are at risk for or living with HIV disease.