Elton John has said that despite major advances in treating the disease, AIDS still exists around the globe.
“There is still an AIDS crisis - not only in sub-Saharan Africa, but right here in America, in your state, in your community," the singer wrote on the CNN website in a piece to accompany a screening of the recent documentary on the subject called The Normal Heart.
“And, just as in 1985, it is silence, fear and stigma that continue to drive the epidemic.”
John founded the Elton John AIDS Foundation in 1992 following the death in 1990 of Ryan White, an 18-year old who became infected with the disease after a blood treatment. The Foundation has raised more than $300 million for treatment and prevention of AIDS.
“Today, we know how to protect everyone,” John says. "And we have the ability to treat every single person living with HIV. Yet AIDS continues to prey upon the most vulnerable in our society: the poor, the incarcerated, sex workers, drug users, and those living in regions where intolerance and stigma are facts of life. Today, as ever, silence equals death.”
“Fear was everywhere,” John wrote, recalling the situation 25 years ago. “Around the country, family members shunned infected relatives, doctors were afraid to touch AIDS patients, let alone treat them, and hospital wards filled up with young men covered in lesions, dying excruciating deaths.
"I’ve almost lost track of the number of funerals I went to in those years. My friends were dying all around me - I’m lucky that I somehow survived.”
