A Primary Source Reminder from the Early Days of HIV/AIDS

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Last week, I received a press release from the National Institutes of Health noting the publication 30 years ago of the first ‘official’ report that many consider to have heralded the beginning of the AIDS epidemic—a report in the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report), a publication of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and Kaposi’s sarcoma in otherwise healthy young men who all happened to be gay.

This report (which included various causative theories, including speculation that the weakened immune system among these gay men might somehow have resulted from the use of lifestyle drugs such as amyl nitrate!), seemed late in coming for those of us who’d been seeing unusual infections among gay men since the mid-1970s.

In 1975, I became aware of these young men when they started coming for diagnostic consultation with the physicians I worked with in a private hematology–oncology practice in New York City. No one could figure out why they had developed opportunistic infections that were normally seen only in patients who’d been on chemotherapy or who had other immune disorders. We talked about the fact that similar cases were being seen at the (now defunct) St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Greenwich Village. […]

2016-11-21T13:12:48-05:00June 6th, 2011|Nursing|2 Comments
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What’s Ugly? — And Other Crucial Conversations for Nurses

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Our monthly Art of Nursing department—often, a poem or image somehow related to health care—is a unique feature for a scholarly publication, but one we feel strongly about. We believe that in order to provide truly holistic care, nurses need to know about more than evidence-based clinical content—they also need to be aware of many other aspects of the human experience. 

One thing art teaches us is that people don’t always see things the same way. What’s beautiful, illuminating, or at least useful to one person may be ugly or offensive to another. Consider billboards with public health messages. To some, such a billboard may seem to be an eyesore blotting the landscape; to others, the image and message is a powerful tool for disseminating life-saving information. Our September 2010 Art of Nursing (click through to the PDF version) showcased billboards in Guinea-Bissau, a poor country with HIV prevalence  of epidemic proportions. The billboards, photographed by Dawn Starin (here’s a blog post she wrote about them), are used to encourage people to get tested. A blog post by AJN senior editor Sylvia Foley about the column noted concerns some had expressed about these billboards:

Are the billboards effective? Starin writes, “Although the billboards are fabulous to look at, many health professionals I spoke with thought they exemplified time and money wasted, in part because of the high nationwide illiteracy rate.” One health worker emphasized the need for more culture-specific studies on sexual practices and tradition, so that appropriate education […]

2016-11-21T13:13:30-05:00April 18th, 2011|Nursing|12 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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