Reagan Through Obama

Reagan Revolution through President Obama

Explain ways in which the AIDS epidemic shook American’s general confidence beginning in the 1980s.

In 1981 AIDS was detected in the United States. Politicians were slow to respond to the AIDS epidemic because they felt that the people that were affected by AIDS were mainly homosexual men and they felt they could ignore this group of people. President Reagan was reluctant to bring AIDS into the spotlight and even ordered his Surgeon General not to discuss the crisis. Reagan felt that it was a gay disease however; it did not take very long for the disease to spread beyond the gay community and affect the lives of many Americans (Shultz, 2012).

On June 5, 1981 the first official documentation of the diseases was published by the Center for Disease Control. The initial report documented the cases of gay men that were hospitalized with pneumonia and disseminated candida infections. At this point in time there were approximately 41 official reported cases and many of these men died within two years of being diagnosed. From the onset there were many prejudices and stigmas concerning AIDS. The government chose to ignore the disease and offered no support to the public. The nation lived in fear because they were uneducated on how the disease was transmitted and who was at risk (The History of HIV and Aids in American, n.d.)

Because President Reagan and the American government ignored the epidemic this caused the AIDS activist movement to blame the Reagan administration for the deaths of thousands of gay men across the country. By 1983 the number of reported AIDS cases had grown to over three thousand and almost half of these people had died. It took until 1985 for President Reagan to publicly mention the disease and until 1986 for the Surgeon General to report what the nation should do to help prevent the spread of the disease (The History of HIV and Aids in American, n.d.)

In 1985 the government...