At last count, six high level HIV/AIDS researchers and experts lost their lives on July 17th when their Malaysian Airlines flight taking them to the 2014 International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, Australia, was shot down over war-torn Ukraine.
Joep Lange, a Dutch physician and professor at the University of Amsterdam, as well as a passionate activist for equitable health policy, was one of them.
I didn’t know his name until this week.
According to his obituary in The Telegraph, Lange “was instrumental in the development of techniques of clinical care of HIV-infected patients from as early as 1982, when the disease, then spreading rapidly among gay men, did not even have a name.”
I remember when it didn’t have a name.
In early 1982, my father asked me to join him out in the family garden. That’s where our private conversations usually took place. Not everybody in the family knew he was gay then. I was 31.
Dad told me about the horrible disease that was affecting gay men he knew in San Francisco.
After describing the reddish-purple spots on their chests and backs, he told me that people then were calling it “the gay cancer.”
My younger sister had died from cancer just three years earlier. I didn’t think I could bear any more talk of cancer.
Still, the news kept coming in, from my dad and TV and newspapers, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I was forced to hear it.
My sister had lived with her disease for four years. But these men with the gay cancer, my father said, were dying much sooner than that.
Even when it did have a name, in July of 1982, then-President Ronald Reagan wouldn’t say it out loud publicly until 1985.
Not until May of 1987 would he make his first public speech about AIDS. By the end of that year more than 50,000 cases of AIDS in the U.S. had been reported. Deaths numbered more than 40,000.
I didn’t know until this week that Joep Lange had been researching and developing treatments for HIV/AIDS for five years before our President made that speech. Lange would continue his research for the next 32 years, until the jetliner he was on was shot down.
Lange had also been an outspoken advocate for access to treatment and care in some of the world’s poorest places, including sub-Saharan Africa.
A CBC News online article carries this quote:
“‘These drugs have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Europe and the United States. They could do the same for millions more in developing countries,’ Lange said in 2002. ‘If we can get cold Coca–Cola and beer to every remote corner of Africa, it should not be impossible to do the same with drugs.’”
Though my father was sexually active in San Francisco at the height of the burgeoning gay rights movement as well as in the early days of the epidemic, he fortunately never contracted AIDS. As one of the HIV-negative gay men at the time, he volunteered as an AIDS Buddy where he comforted a dozen or so afflicted men who faced certain death.
Joep Lange’s work has kept hundreds of thousands of AIDS sufferers alive. We’ll never know what he might have achieved for humanity if his life hadn’t been so senselessly cut short.
I know his name now. And I’m grateful for his medical breakthroughs and tireless social activism on behalf of the sick and the poor and those who’ve been disregarded.
Rest in peace, Joep Lange.
Read more in Laura Hall’s My Dad’s Closet: A daughter’s memoir, coming eventually to a bookstore near you. Laura and her husband live in San Francisco.
Gillian Bannon says
Thank you for writing this, Laura Hall…….The placement of this story in the mainstream news was not in the forefront as it should have been. It was mentioned with minimal detail. We have lost yet another great world influence, may your wings spread wide Joep Lange, you will not be forgotten…Amen
Laura Hall says
You’re sure right about that, Gillian. Another senseless death of another great world influence, as you say. Feeling immense gratitude for Dr. Lange and for his colleagues who were also on that flight. RIP good people.