Originally published by Time on November 20, 2014
How the U.S. fought the disease by thinking big and staying smart
At my home in Washington, D.C., placed so that I see it every morning, is a photograph of Princess Adeyeo, a young Liberian woman I met in 2012. Princess had been a refugee during Liberia's civil war; when she returned there, she found that she was HIV-positive. But in Monrovia's John F. Kennedy Hospital she was put on a course of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs), which prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus, and a few months before our visit she gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. He was HIV-negative, healthy.
Right now, of course, people associate Liberia with Ebola. It's right that we get mad about Ebola-mad that the world waited so long to tackle the outbreak; mad that poor, vulnerable societies don't have the resources needed to tackle infectious diseases. But we should remember too that in the past few years, Liberia-in fact, every country, rich or poor-has seen small miracles like the story of Princess and her son, and sees more of them each year.
In 2003, across all of sub-Saharan Africa, just 50,000 people were on ARVs, now more than 9 million are. There is no reason, in the next few years, that we cannot virtually end mother-to-child transmission of HIV in even the most challenging environments. Unheralded, we just passed a tipping point: in 2013, more people were added to the rolls of those on lifesaving treatment for HIV/AIDS than the number who were newly infected. That crossover of trend lines should mark the beginning of the end of AIDS.
