And The Band Played On - Have We Learned Anything Part 2

A friend who was recently found to be HIV+ asked me a lot of questions about the emergence of AIDS in the 1980's.  He was born long after that time, and was relying on what information he could find to learn about the history of this modern disease.  I answered his questions as best I could, as well as recommending he view And The Band Played On.

Opens in Central Africa in 1976 as medical researchers with the World Health Organization venture into an African Village where it seems nearly the entire population has died from Ebola, which was a new virus at the time.  A year later in Copenhagen, a woman dies of a type of pneumonia, pneumocystis, that's usually associated with another illness.  Yet doctors cannot find another illness that's causing the pneumocystis.  Similar cases begin to crop up around the world.  In San Francisco, because of the high gay population and the high promiscuity, it comes to the attention of local health officials. 

From there on it’s a chronicle of the battle to get the disease recognized and figure out how it is transmitted.  It was easy to pigeon-hole as “gay cancer” until it started appearing in the general population.  Still, people didn’t like to admit they had contracted the disease due to the stigma attached to it.  Swoosie Kurtz portrays a socialite with the disease who’s reluctant to admit it.  However, once “normal” people like her rose above the suspicion and gossip to acknowledge the disease, it helped a great deal.  One of the biggest battles the team of doctors faced was getting the Red Cross to recognize that the disease threatened the blood supply. 

What And The Band Played On demonstrates most of all is how human beings are sacrificed to egos, budgets, and bureaucratic red-tape.  Matthew Modine is a scientist with the Center for Disease Control, Don Francis.  He becomes embroiled in the battle for recognition of the disease once he sees disturbing patterns emerging.  His is an uphill battle as he seems to be fighting against the morality of the times as well as a whole host of other obstacles to get to the point where the disease is simply recognized for what it is. 

Alan Alda plays against type as an opportunistic scientist who’s more worried about credit than actually making progress against the disease.  He succeeds in delaying recognition of the disease for what it is as well as crucial testing.  How many more people were infected and died due to this man’s machinations? The world will never know. 

The rest of the cast reads like a who’s who of early 1990’s Hollywood: Richard Gere portrays a choreographer infected with the disease, Phil Collins is a sleazy bathhouse owner more worried about his profits than spreading the disease, Ian McKellan is an activist in San Francisco, Lilly Tomlin, Glenne Headley, David Dukes, and Anjelica Huston all portray various doctors involved with the disease. 

As we’re starting to hear talk of people being “cured” of AIDS, it’s important to reflect how it began, and make sure it never happens again.  The government and the private sector should never drag their feet simply because of how they feel about the group of people affected by it.  We have a history of not learning from our mistakes and perhaps if we had learned that lesson from various drug epidemics when they originated in ghetto areas of the cities instead of ignoring them until it started affecting white kids, we would have been more on the ball when AIDS reared its ugly head. 

This is something that should be mandatory viewing in health classes, just to get an idea of how this started and how the government will fail to protect us from what’s out there.  If you haven’t yet seen it, you should.  It still resonates twenty years after it was made.