<figure>
 <img src="https://media.eaglewebservices.com/public/2020/12/1606925633122.png" alt="Donna Sweet, a doctor of internal medicine at the University of Kansas School of Medicine-Wichita and nationally recognized expert on HIV and AIDS, saw her first AIDS patients in Kansas in 1983. (University of Kansas School of Medicine-Wichita)" />
 <figcaption>Donna Sweet, a doctor of internal medicine at the University of Kansas School of Medicine-Wichita and nationally recognized expert on HIV and AIDS, saw her first AIDS patients in Kansas in 1983. (University of Kansas School of Medicine-Wichita)</figcaption>
 </figure>By C.J. JANOVY <a href="https://kansasreflector.com/2020/12/02/this-kansas-doctor-watched-a-scary-new-disease-become-manageable-thanks-to-science/">Kansas Reflector</a>I’m old. Old enough to be among those who <a href="https://www.kcur.org/community/2020-04-11/veterans-of-the-aids-epidemic-in-kansas-city-have-advice-for-coping-during-covid-19">had familiar feelings</a>
 earlier this year when a mysterious disease broke out, and no one was 
sure how it spread, and everyone quickly learned what the letters CDC 
stood for, and we watched the death counts rise, and <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/16/834873162/long-before-covid-19-dr-tony-fauci-changed-medicine-in-america-forever">a doctor named Anthony Fauci</a> was the government expert.Nearly 40 years ago, the disease was AIDS.<a href="http://wichita.kumc.edu/mpa/donna-sweet-md.html">Donna Sweet</a>, a doctor of internal medicine at the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita, remembers those days too.Now <a href="https://emilytaylorcenter.ku.edu/womens-hall-of-fame/sweet-donna">a legendary figure</a>
 in HIV and AIDS circles, Sweet saw her first patient with the disease 
in 1983. The fact that a doctor in Kansas was seeing such patients in 
those days was extraordinary.“She and her staff are 
known as huggers, which she said may have done more for 1980s patients 
since so little was understood about the transmission of the AIDS 
virus,” the Wichita Business Journal noted in an article last year 
bestowing upon her <a href="https://www.bizjournals.com/wichita/c/2019-health-care-heroes/10035/lifetime-achievement-donna-sweet.html">a lifetime achievement award</a> and calling her a health care hero. “Because nobody else would touch them,” Sweet said of her patients.“I felt very trusted,” 
Sweet told me. “I tried very hard to put into practice what I truly 
believe: All comers need quality health care regardless of their social 
situation or ethnic background and their disease. I felt very good that 
people would share with me their secrets and their lives in order to get
 what little help I could give them at that time.”Some of the patients who started with her 25 or 30 years ago are still alive, she said.I was talking with Sweet on Tuesday. It was Dec. 1, the date recognized annually since 1988 as <a href="https://www.who.int/campaigns/world-aids-day/2020">World AIDS Day</a>. Last year, <a href="https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet">38 million people</a> were living with HIV around the world and nearly 700,000 people died of AIDS-related causes.I asked if she saw parallels between AIDS and COVID-19.“The stigma is certainly 
there,” she said. “It’s a different kind of stigma, but again people 
have taken to blaming other people for the spread instead of blaming the
 virus. We certainly lived with that stigma, with HIV being sexually 
transmitted as well as by injected drug use. We still haven’t gotten 
completely rid of that stigma, but we still keep trying.”She also sees parallels with people trying to shelter in place and decrease the spread by changing their behavior.“It was scary back then 
for the patients and for people everywhere because nobody really knew 
much about it,” she said. “That’s a parallel to COVID — the fear of the 
unknown is what incites a lot of bad, unreasonable behavior.”There’s another eerie echo.<figure>
 <img src="https://media.eaglewebservices.com/public/2020/12/1606925703864.jpeg" alt="Donna Sweet in the late 1970s. (University of Kansas School of Medicine-Wichita)" />
 <figcaption>Donna Sweet in the late 1970s. (University of Kansas School of Medicine-Wichita)</figcaption>
 </figure>“When I was giving 
lectures in the 1980s and ‘90s, trying to get people to treat my 
patients as human beings and get rid of the fear and hysteria,” she 
remembered, “I would say, ‘Thank goodness this is not a respiratory 
virus. If it was, then you could worry about touching the telephone, 
head sets, chairs. AIDS isn’t spread that way — it’s bloodborne and in 
bodily fluids. Avoid blood, avoid sex, and you don’t have to worry about
 it.’ ”Now, though, someone with their mask down in the vicinity of an ill-timed sneeze could end the lives of many others.Seven years after she saw her first AIDS patient, Congress passed the <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/08/18/celebrating-30-years-of-ryan-white-care-act.html">Ryan White CARE Act</a> to funnel money into caring for and treating people with HIV and AIDS.“Kansas got some of that money in 1993-94, and we really started to see a big increase,” Sweet remembered.She kept working and 
witnessed what had been a lethal disease for which there was no medicine
 to one that is now a chronic, manageable illness.“Now most people are 
easily treated with one pill once a day and they live to the same age 
they would if they didn’t have HIV,” she said. “It’s truly a remarkable 
change. Now there may be a vaccine in a month that will put this down, 
as it should be, as the last pandemic and not the current pandemic.”That will be because of science.“We know how to help you 
not get infected,” she said. “So I would say to all Kansans: trust 
science, trust doctors. Don’t believe everything you see on social 
media. We have good scientific data on this, but many people are still 
treating this as some kind of political hoax and it’s not.”She repeated what the doctors always say: Maintain social distance. Wash your hands. <a href="https://kansasreflector.com/2020/11/23/kansas-chamber-hospitals-make-plea-for-voluntary-mask-use/">Wear masks</a>.After our conversation, I 
thought about another parallel. Back then, people realized they could 
use a simple but effective form of protection. Condoms might have been a
 weird inconvenience at first, but soon they were party favors and drag 
queens threw them like candy from pride parade floats. We knew they 
saved lives.C.J. Janovy is a veteran journalist with deep roots in the Midwest. Before joining the Kansas Reflector, she was an editor and reporter at Kansas City’s NPR affiliate, KCUR. Before that, she edited the city’s alt-weekly newspaper, The Pitch.

OPINION: Kan. doctor started fighting a scary new disease 40 years ago