As scientists and researchers were about to gather in South Africa for the International AIDS Conference last summer, the PBS NewsHour launched an ambitious six-part series to ask a bold question: is ending the AIDS epidemic within reach? Even with no vaccine and no cure in sight, some of the world’s top researchers were increasingly confident that we now have the tools at hand to break the back of this epidemic. Correspondent William Brangham and producer Jason Kane, in partnership with reporter Jon Cohen of Science Magazine, traveled to six places around the world that have big plans for ending their epidemics: San Francisco, Atlanta, New York, Kenya, Rwanda and South Africa. Together, these places account for about 25% of the world’s 36 million HIV-infected people.
In the series, the NewsHour was able to both explain the complicated science behind the push to end AIDS, as well as explore the personal, sometimes harrowing stories of the people grappling with the virus — like the homeless, drug-addicted, HIV-positive man and his girlfriend in San Francisco who the NewsHour team followed over several months. Their story — and many others — showed just how tough ending this epidemic will be. The NewsHour’s series told many other surprising and nuanced stories. Among them:
— In Rwanda, a nation in the grips of an AIDS epidemic, the NewsHour visited a rural area that had pulled off a small medical miracle: by using life-saving antiretroviral drugs that target HIV and some “aggressive neighborliness,” this region for three straight years had stopped all transmission of the virus from an infected mother to her child.
— In South Africa, the NewsHour profiled a clinical trial in Cape Town that’s doing what almost no other place in the world is trying: offering HIV-uninfected teenage girls antiretroviral pills as a preventive.
— The NewsHour followed members of a group on Long Island, New York, that’s beating back an HIV resurgence among middle-class people who inject drugs, as well as visited a public hospital in hard-hit Atlanta, Ga., where hundreds still die every year from AIDS.
— The series also spent an entire episode on an island in western Kenya where fishermen have shockingly high rates of HIV-infection (upwards of 30%), but where researchers used some simple techniques to achieve treatment success rates that rival the richest nations in the world.
The NewsHour’s series provided its viewers with the most comprehensive, authoritative status report on the fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic, exploring the ambitions, the roadblocks, the missteps and the breakthroughs that continue to make this one of the biggest public health stories of the 21st century.