First-Ever White House Conference on HIV and AIDS
President Bill Clinton convened the first White House Conference on HIV and AIDS on this day.
President Clinton’s active support for HIV and AIDS programs reversed the neglect by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. On Reagan’s delay in publicly speaking about the HIV/AIDS crisis, see September 17, 1985 — four years after HIV was first identified (January 5, 1981).
By the end of 1995, more than 500,000 people in the U.S. had been diagnosed with AIDS. Partly as a result of a vigorous federal research effort that began after Reagan and Bush left office, the number of new AIDS/HIV infections and deaths every year declined dramatically.
Read President Clinton’s remarks at the Conference: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=50856&st=&st1=
Don’t miss: David France, How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS (1916)
Read about the early years of the AIDS crisis: Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (2007)
Learn more at a timeline on HIV/AIDS: http://www.aids.gov/hiv-aids-basics/hiv-aids-101/aids-timeline/