🏳️🌈🏺 World AIDS Day
🏳️🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️🌈
World AIDS Day was first observed on December 1, 1988, becoming the first international health awareness event. Conceived by the World Health Organization, it was created during a moment of profound global stigma, political inaction, and rising AIDS deaths. Its purpose was simple and radical: acknowledge the crisis, honor those lost, support those living with HIV, and spur world governments to action, when most were ignoring it as the ‘Gay Plague.’
The virus itself emerged half a century earlier. Though AIDS was first clinically recognized 7 years before in the United States, the genetic evidence shows HIV-1 group M—the strain responsible for the global pandemic—likely made the jump from primates to humans in the 20s. The virus circulated silently for decades before it was identified, by which time HIV had spread across continents.
More than 91 million people have been infected with HIV since the start of the epidemic, and over 44 million have died of AIDS-related illnesses. Today, about 41 million people worldwide live with HIV, with 1.3 million new infections reported in 2024 alone. Despite enormous advances in treatment and prevention, global inequity continues to shape who gets sick, who gets care, and who is left behind.
This year’s World AIDS Day theme is “Overcoming disruption, transforming the AIDS response.” It highlights the growing concern that political instability—especially the defunding of major U.S. global AIDS initiatives (USAID’s PEPFAR) threaten decades of progress. Community-led organizations, which have historically been the backbone of HIV prevention and care, now face heightened barriers at the very moment when the end of the pandemic was finally on the horizon.
World AIDS Day remains a call to action: restore government funding, support people living with HIV, reverse rising new-infection trends, and fight the stigma that still prevents millions from seeking testing and treatment. Testing matters. Early diagnosis and consistent treatment not only make HIV chronic but manageable—they stop transmission altogether.
U = U — Undetectable = Untransmittable.
When a person living with HIV is on effective treatment and reaches an undetectable viral load, they do not transmit HIV to sexual partners. This proven fact is how we can still beat this virus for good.
Get tested this month, get on prep (contact your doctor or the health department), and get global funding restored before we have several million new AIDS-related deaths.
