And the Band Played on

832 Words4 Pages
And the Band Played On Eight years ago, I witnessed an epidemic in my country which was known as cholera. It was horrible because a lot of people lost their lives. It was mostly poor people who got the disease. The government of my country did not really try to find a solution for the epidemic. I thought that it was just in Africa, the government will not take care of an epidemic. Then I watched the movie And the Band Played On, which showed me that I was wrong. The movie exposed the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) epidemic in United States (US). HIV was discovered three decades ago. During the first decade, people thought that the virus was just for gay people because there was a large amount of gays who had this disease. (Wafaa M. El-Sadr, 2010).The HIV virus is transmitted by sexual relation, by blood transfusion, and mother and child transmission. To prevent HIV, there had been some prevention programs which were created (Friedland, Tanya Schreibman and Gerald, 2003). In the past decade, there was a movie named And the Band Played On which was created to show people behavior when in that period, and the government’s role. So, did the government have a big role in the spreading of this disease in US? The movie And the Band Played On displayed the rapid growth of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in US, and the work the government did to stop the epidemic And the Band Played On was a movie that exposes AIDS crisis in the 1980’s and the early 1990’s. The movie illustrates the reaction of gay community, heterosexual community and medical community against AIDS crisis. After the discovery of AIDS, the gay community suffered of social hostility and emotional trauma because they had been held responsible for the disease. The medical community thought that the only way to stop the spreading of the disease was the closure of the bathhouses which were
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