ACT UP and Foscarnet*

I was too afraid, and probably at the time, didn’t have enough personally at stake to join ACT UP.

In 1990 the Sixth International Conference on AIDS was going to be held in San Francisco. It was a huge event; the cases had begun to skyrocket, the death toll enormous, effective treatments few. San Francisco was one of the major epicenters of the outbreak. ACT UP had been founded by Larry Kramer in 1987 to push for more funding for research and treatment. In the face of the slow pace of development of the drug companies as well as their funding through the NIH, we knew that there were going to be massive protests and disruptions at the Conference.

I remember that Rick Levine had a poster presentation about Maitri at the conference. I found it, tucked away in the tunnel that connected the hotels to Moscone Center. But Rick had convinced me that if I was to attend the conference, I should try to concentrate of seeing what therapies might be coming up that could be effective for "the kids" in the hospice,


*Foscarnet is an FDA-approved antiviral therapy used to treat cytomegalovirus (CMV) and CMV-associated ophthalmic retinitis in individuals diagnosed with AIDS and who are unable to tolerate gancyclovir or as salvage therapy for those who have drug-resistant CMV and fail gancyclovir.

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