Harvard Public Health Review
August, 1982. Robin Herman, who is currently assistant dean for research communications at HSPH, was then a metro reporter for The New York Times. She was assigned to cover a cluster of cases in New York City of a frightening new disease primarily afflicting homosexual men. When she wrote the word “AIDS” in her article, it was, in retrospect, a landmark moment: the first mention of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome printed by the Times.
For the story headlined “A Disease’s Spread Provokes Anxiety,” Herman interviewed a doctor and patients in Greenwich Village. “I could feel how intensely worried they were,” Herman says. “Nobody knew what caused it. There was no treatment. And it was lethal—quickly.”
To have written that first article on AIDS, she adds, “sounds grand now. But what you can’t tell by reading the story online is that it was buried.” Running originally on page 31 in the Sunday paper, it received scant attention and was quickly forgotten.
“When I look back at this story, I weep,” says Herman. “Imagine if the Times, by putting it on page one, had confirmed that this was a disease that needed to be taken seriously. I’m sure that would have made a difference.” Editorial attention was instead focused on toxic shock syndrome, a bacterial infection linked to super-absorbent tampons.
“The story was buried because the disease was affecting a marginalized group,” she says. “Whose suffering are we ignoring now because they are powerless? Those are the people whose health we have to champion.”
—Amy Roeder
Read Herman's article A Disease's Spread Provokes Anxiety, originally published in The New York Times on August 8, 1982.
