"Dallas Buyer's Club" covers a lot of the same ground as an Oscar-nominated documentary about AIDS from last year, "How To Survive A Plague." Each film covers the time from mid-to-late 1980s when the disease struck, when there was no accepted or effective medical treatment, when the patients themselves had to push for better research and faster tracks to bring drugs to market.
Each is a memoir of a terrible time. "Dallas Buyer's Club" triggered a flashback to around 1988, when as a reporter and columnist at The Hartford Courant, I attended a meeting at which the paper's top editor at the time questioned whether the paper should write at all about condoms and their role in disease prevention. At the time, the word "condom" had rarely, if ever, appeared in the newspaper.
A lot of things have changed. Others haven't. This hour, we explore the history and current status of AIDS. Click here for more information on HIV/AIDS research in Connecticut, and for the Academy Awards Red Carpet Experience fundraiser at Spotlight Theaters.
If you have questions or comments, write below, email Colin@wnpr.org, or tweet @wnprcolin.
GUESTS:
- Shawn Lang is the Director of Public Policy at AIDS Connecticut.
- Karina Danvers is the Director of the CT AIDS Educational Training Center at the Yale School of Medicine AIDS Program, which provides education primarily to doctors and other providers on topics related to HIV/AIDS.
- Dr. R. Douglas Bruce is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine, and assistant professor of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health. He’s also the interim chief of medicine at the Cornell Scott Hill Health center.
