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The general population still thinks HIV is something that came in the 80s and went away, or that it only affects the gay population or intravenous drug users.

A lot has changed since the 1980s, when the United States was a country with one of the greatest numbers of people infected with HIV.

AIDS had won gays sympathy; they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s.

Early in 1986, the World Health Organization in Geneva still regarded AIDS as an ailment of the promiscuous few.

Eighty percent of Americans with HIV do not know they are infected.

You can't be involved in healthcare without being involved in the battle against AIDS.

In Paris, AIDS was dismissed as an American phobia until French people started dying; then everyone said, 'Well, you have to die some way or another.' If Americans were hysterical and pragmatic, the French were fatalistic: depressed but determined to keep the party going.

HIV/AIDS has no boundaries.

If Carter had been there when the AIDS crisis came up, it would have been a whole different story. It could have been treated like a legitimate disease.

In Africa through the 1990s, with notable exceptions in Senegal and Uganda, nearly all the ruling powers denied they had a problem with AIDS.