Ryan Wayne White Essay

In 1984, Ryan Wayne White was diagnosed with AIDS (Waguespack). This simple news would forever change the five years left of his life, and shift the way that people see HIV/AIDS. Though many people have contracted the illnesses in one way or another, White is the most influential because of the celebrities that took interest in his condition. After a long childhood struggle that eventually lead to expulsion from his middle school, Ryan became a poster child for his disease, which turn the way that the public and the United States government felt towards the sickness forever.

Ryan Wayne White was born on December 6, 1971 with hemophilia, an unfortunate hereditary disease ("Ryan White."). He was treated with great caution by his mother and had

Before this it reached this point, HIV was thought to have originated in Central Africa in the 1930s (Smollen). Later, something scientists called "HIV-2" was being transferred from mangabey monkeys (Smollen). For a while, not many breakthroughs happened around these illnesses, except for one medicine released in 1964 (Smollen). This is because not many people were getting infected and it was not what scientists and doctors were concerned with at the time. Suddenly, AIDS was found in 5 gay men in 1981, so it was named GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) for a short period of time (Smollen). Because of this discovery, it was thought that gay people were the only ones able to contract this disease, which was definitely false from a medical standpoint ("Ryan White"). Since many believed that, Ryan was teased for being gay at school, before people were more educated about the subject. Thankfully, people know more about the topic, and assumptions are no longer made. For this, we have Ryan White to thank, because without him and the celebrities that popularized him, HIV/AIDS would not medically

After White died in 1990 at age 18, president George H. W. Bush signed the CARE (Compressive AIDS Resources Emergency) act to help fund underprivileged and low income families with members that have AIDS (Rowan and Honeycut). Along with medical advancements, this was a great resource and gave hope to victims. In one short year, $2 million had been donated to families, in hope to win the long, painful battle against HIV and AIDS (Rowan and Honeycut). If Ryan White had not kept fighting against the odds, our national perception of these fatal diseases would be skewed, and almost all faith would be lost for current sufferers. In 2006, the president’s son, George W. Bush reauthorized the CARE act to help more of our population and donate even more money (Rowan and