In 1983, AIDS was a death sentence. The HIV virus had just been identified as the cause of a terrifying disease that was killing young, previously healthy people. Even though scientists had determined that the disease could not be spread by casual contact, people with HIV were shunned. In 1985, 13-year-old Ryan White was barred from his Indiana middle school because he had contracted the virus through a blood transfusion to treat hemophilia. Researchers around the world raced to come up with a way to stop the virus, but the death toll kept rising.
Slowly, the global effort to combat the virus started to pay off.