The Daily Agenda for Thursday, February 4

Jim Burroway

February 4th, 2016

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From Michael's Thing (New York, NY), February 2, 1976, page 56.

From Michael’s Thing (New York, NY), February 2, 1976, page 56.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Florida Strikes Ban on Campus Gay Groups: 1982. It marked a rare victory for LGBT rights in Florida when all seven justices of the Florida Supreme Court declared a state law banning gay college groups from campuses was an unconstitutional infringement on free speech.

The law had been sponsored by state Sen. Alan Trask and Rep. Tom Bush, and would deny state money to a state university or college which allowed its facilities be used by groups “advocating sex between unmarried persons.” While the law was broadly written, the sponsors said that it was aimed directly at LGBT groups. Their goal was to prevent the state spending money to “promote trash.”

But the state justices countered, “If it were to be held that freedom of expression applies only to views that the national, state or local community find to be within the range of reasonable discourse, the First Amendment would have little meaning or purpose.” The court added that the state, “may not make the privilege of attending (a public university) contingent upon the surrender of constitutional rights.”

The suit was instigated by John Wall, who was only seventeen years old when his community college denied him permission to form a gay student group. Now eighteen, Wall was delighted by the ruling. “I knew the court had no other choice but to do that,” he said. “Is it all over with? No, with Sen. Trask I can’t know. I’m sure there will be more battles to come for everybody. For Florida, it ‘s just one step further we’ve gotten. There’s always going to be someone trying to do something against us.”

In fact, Sen. Task had already announced that he would try to appeal the “tragic and dangerous interpretation of the U.S. Constitution” to the U.S. Supreme Court. He also filed bills in the state legislature to get around the state Supreme Court ruling, as well as to clarify Florida’s law on “fornication” — extramarital sex, under which gays and lesbians (and straight people) were liable to prosecution — as a second-degree misdemeanor.

[Source: “Florida Court Strikes Down State Law Aimed at Gays.” The Advocate, issue 338 (March 18, 1982): 9.]

The Congo River, north of the provincial capital of Mbandaka, Équateur province.

AIDS Cases Discovered from 1976: 1988. Common wisdom today, even with all that we know about the history of the epidemic, often still sets the start of AIDS with the June 1981 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describing five gay men who had died of a mysterious disease in Los Angeles (see Jun 5). When the HIV virus was isolated in 1984 and a test for the virus became available in 1985, several avenues of research opened up to try to figure out where this virus came from. Doctors in Paris and Brussels, who had long been treating wealthy African patients from their former colonies bearing all of the hallmarks of the new disease, pointed to Africa as a possible source for the virus. On February 4, 1988, the New England Journal of Medicine published a report by Dr. Nzila Nzilambi from Kinshasa, Zaire and other doctors from Belgium and the CDC which strongly suggested an African source for the virus, and revealed that AIDS had been a persistent health problem in rural Zaire as early as the mid 1970s.

Commercial center of Mbandaka, Équateur province.

In 1976, there had been an outbreak of Ebola in the northeastern Zaire province of Équateur along the Congo river. In the course of the medical investigations, hundreds of serum samples were collected from people throughout the area. Those samples remained preserved Zaire and were flown to Atlanta for testing. Investigators then went back out to Équateur in 1986 and collected more samples from as many people as possible, 388 in all. Ninety of them had also been among the 659 samples collected in 1976. Five of the samples from 1976 tested positive for HIV. Two were still alive ten years later; one was healthy, but the other was already showing signs of a suppressed immune system. Three were dead. One woman tested positive in 1976 was confirmed dead, “after a prolonged illness characterized by weight loss, fever, cough, and diarrhea” — all common symptoms of diseases associated with AIDS. Another woman, the wife of one of the two HIV-positive men still alive, “died in 1981 after a long illness associated with fever, weight loss, skin rash, and oral lesions.” Again an apparent death from AIDS. The third was a child who was seven years old in 1976, who “died of pneumonia and weight loss at the age of 16.”

The doctors concluded: “The results of our study showed that HIV infection was already present in an isolated area of the Équateur province of Zaire in 1976 and that the prevalence of infection in the general population there did not change significantly over the 10-year observation period.”

[Source: Nzila Nzilambi, Kevin M. De Cock, Donald N. Forthal, et al. “The prevalence of infection with human immunodeficiency virus over a 10-year period in rural Zaire.” New England Journal of Medicine 318, no. 5 (February 4, 1988): 276-279.]

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

Ben

February 10th, 2016

So weird, I know I sent this in as a daily agenda addition, but not only was it seemingly ignored, but there has been a confirmed case of AIDs being found in AMERICA in the 60s, forget having to go as far abroad as Zaire.

This summer, in St. Louis, I began researching the life and death of Robert Rayford, a 16-year-old black teenager who died of HIV-related complications in 1969. This was not confirmed until 1987, after two years of testing his tissue that had been saved at the time of his death. The revelation of the cause of Rayford’s death upended the conventional wisdom of the time — which insisted that HIV had entered the US in the 1970s — suggesting that HIV had in fact been circulating here as early as the mid-1960s, and not just along the nation’s coasts, but also in the heartland.

From here: http://hyperallergic.com/264934/a-history-of-erasing-black-artists-and-bodies-from-the-aids-conversation/

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