Reflections from the '80s: the HIV epidemic in Myanmar

March 20, 2021

For the last three years off the fifteen I worked in the US my clinical life was consumed with setting up a unit at Yale University to study and treat patients with the mysterious Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), the cause of which was eventually discovered to be a unique retro-virus called, logically enough, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, (HIV). In those early years all the patients I treated died from their infection. By the time I returned to Australia (1985), HIV had been established as the causative agent and  the epidemic was spreading out of control in the US, Africa...