HIV Long-Term Survivors Awareness Day (HLTSAD)

The first HIV Long-Term Survivors Awareness Day June 5, 2014. Tez Anderson started it, a long-term survivor living with HIV since 1983. Let’s Kick ASS—AIDS Survivor Syndrome (LKA), the lead sponsor of the day.

HLTSAD is a time to celebrate the strength and resiliencies of people living longest with HIV/AIDS while highlighting current challenges and creating changes to improve the Quality of Life for HLTS.

Estimates are that 25% of all 1.2 million people living with HIV in the US acquired HIV before 1996 and the advent of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART). That’s 330,000 HLTS. There were no treatments then ineffective monotherapies for the first 15 years of AIDS.

People who became HIV before the advent of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy in 1996, or pre-HAART Long-Term Survivors, are a distinct cohort facing myriad unique challenges.

Why 5 June?

It’s the anniversary of the start of the AIDS pandemic on June 5, 1981. It is the beginning of AIDS before it was idenified as HIV and AIDS.

June 5, 2022 marks 41 years since a new public health threat first appeared in the United States. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first reported cases of a rare lung infection called Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) among five young, previously healthy gay men in Los Angeles. At the same time, there were reports of a group of men in New York and California with an unusually aggressive cancer named Kaposi’s Sarcoma.

First dubbed “The Gay Cancer”, then “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency” (GRID) and in 1983 as “Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome” (AIDS). In May 1986 is was officially called “human immunodeficiency virus) HIV.

HIV/AIDS. Today we know that HIV doesn’t discriminate, and it impacts people of all ages, races, sexual orientations, and socio-economic backgrounds. The reason HIV stigma is still stubbornly pervasive is due to homophobia.

HIV Long-Term Survivors Awareness Day (HLTSAD)

Why 5 June?

Read more about June 5, 1981 here: