And the Band Played on Essay There were many obstacles in the overall research of the disease AIDS. Many encounters occurred such as gay pride, protesters, rivalry, lying and budgets. This disease was a scare and disaster to everybody but nobody knew how to take the right steps with it. Mistakes were made such as comments at the meetings, sending things to France, or approaching the gays in certain ways which cause complications in the research and development. Information to the public also was hard to give because of how uncivilized people would become about the situation.
The number one thought for AIDS was the gay bathhouses. When this went public, there was an excessive amount of controversy and rebellion. Gays were offended, and could not believe such a horrific disease was caused just because of them. It was scientifically proven that the disease was sexually transmitted, and even though the majority of the cases were linked to gays, they still did not support the idea of closing the bathhouses. Since the bathhouses were voted to stay open, more and more people started becoming exposed to AIDS so that was a major set back. There were doctors who supplied infected blood into patients and did not even tell the patient. This caused people who weren’t gay, or involved with bathhouses to get the disease and doctors just tried to cover it up saying they were common post surgery symptoms. This spread the disease even more making the discovery to treatment a lot more difficult.
People were so involved and high strung about their gay pride that they would not listen to the CDC. They protested and kept doing things that the CDC said was a possible cause of the disease. They put their gay pride before finding the cure to the disease which made it so hard for anyone to explain what the disease actually is, how it infected the person, or how to prevent it. In the movie someone stated, “This is not a political issue. This is a health issue. This is not a gay issue. This is a human issue.” This was something that was so hard for people to realize. For a while there wasn’t even a name for the disease because no one really talked about that. Everytime the CDC would try to inform the public, there was some sort of controversy with the other side. Dr. Gallo was extremely mad about Dr. Don
Francis sending blind samples to the French. He did not want the French to have the honor of finding the cure instead of him. He basically made everything about him. Dr. Don Francis said to Gallo, “Is it you against the French? I thought we were all against the virus. If you go to court now, everybody loses. You, the people who die while you quibble.” This explains how people are more focused with themselves and being stubborn with their believe on gay rights, then actually curing the disease and being able to save other peoples life. It was so hard to get into peoples head anything about the disease which postponed a lot of factors greatly.
For a while it was really hard to comprehend what AIDS really was, not only to the common person but to doctors to. When the first case of it came around, they thought the symptoms to be almost impossible. For a long time researchers could not find any way to keep the cells alive. Mice tests weren’t successful. If you had the disease, you knew you were going to die real soon. There wasn’t enough money to test blood or do other things to find out exactly what it was.
The steps to finding the treatment for AIDS was extremely difficult, and frustrating to everyone. Many lives were lost, and a ton of arguments were involved. Many obstacles came in the way of the speed and efficiency with research and development of new drugs. It took a few years to close down bathhouses, but they finally came to the conclusion that closing them down would cause a great decline in the amount of people to encounter this disease. Even though AIDS is still a problem today, thanks to Gallo, Francis and many other doctors new drugs have been developed to treat it.
