Living History Timeline

The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) HIV/AIDS Bureau (HAB) and federal partners are working together on initiatives to improve HIV health outcomes and accelerate the end of the epidemic.

The Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program Approach to Reducing Health Disparities through HIV Care and Treatment toward ending the HIV epidemic in the United States.

Advancing health equity has long been a guiding principle of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program (RWHAP).

For more than three decades, the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program (RWHAP) has provided a comprehensive system of HIV medical care, medication, and essential support services to more than half a million people with HIV in the United States, which improves health outcomes and reduces HIV transmission.

COVID 19 public health emergency presented an immense challenge to delivering HIV care and services to people with HIV.

The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) is one of five federal agencies within the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services leading a new nationwide initiative to end the HIV epidemic by 2030

Approximately 4,000 HIV healthcare providers, HRSA’s Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program recipients and subrecipients, partners, people living with HIV (PLWH), other stakeholders, and members of the general public gathered for the 2018 National Ryan White Conference on HIV Care & Treatment.

Approximately one in five people living with HIV (PLWH) is coinfected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV), and hepatitis C-related liver disease has become one of the leading causes of non-AIDS-related death among PLWH.

The National HIV/AIDS Strategy (the Strategy) is a 5-year plan to reduce new HIV infections, improve health outcomes, reduce disparities, and achieve a more coordinated national response to the HIV epidemic.

Today over 1.2 million people in the United States are living with HIV - one in eight people living with HIV don't know it.

The Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act, the legislation that created the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program (RWHAP), celebrates 25 years of providing comprehensive care for people living with HIV (PLWH) in 2015.

The continuum of engagement in care (later changed to the HIV Care Continuum) was a phrase used by Dr. Laura Cheever, HRSA’s Associate Administrator for the HIV/AIDS Bureau, in her seminal 2007 editorial to describe the fluid nature of HIV health care delivery and patient experience.

Current prevention strategies are drastically reducing the number of annual HIV infections.

The future has never looked brighter for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in the United States.

June 5, 2011, marked the passing of 30 years since AIDS was first recognized as a public health concern in a 1981 article published in a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report about a handful of gay men in several large cities who contracted rare infections.

With no AIDS vaccine and no cure, the road ahead is familiar. We must continue our assault on barriers to care.

Twenty years ago, the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act was passed into law.

The Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act of 2009 contains implicit guidance to the HIV/AIDS Bureau (HAB) to collect client-level, or name-based, data. Grantees and service providers now complete the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program Services Report (RSR) detailing information on all the clients served during a calendar year.

The rate of incarceration among people living with HIV disease has long been alarming: 1 in 4 people with HIV have been in a correctional setting at some point in their lives.

The year 2007 was one of monumental change.

The Ryan White CARE Act was renamed the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Modernization Act of 2006 on December 19, 2006.

The world observed the 25th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic in June 2006.

HIV/AIDS poses serious challenges both to people living with the disease and to their care providers.

In the 2000 reauthorization of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, Congress asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to report on...

In 2003, HRSA’s HIV/AIDS Bureau took a major step to broaden its mission by establishing a Global AIDS Program.

In 2002 HRSA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) established the International Training and Education Center on HIV, known as I-TECH.

<em>A Guide to the Clinical Care of Women With HIV/AIDS</em>, published by HRSA in 2001, is now the primary textbook on the treatment of women with HIV the world over.

By 2001, HRSA had been providing HIV/AIDS services for more than 15 years.

On July 25, 2000, the CARE Act was reauthorized with many new provisions aimed at enhancing health outcomes and reaching the hundreds of thousands of PLWHA not receiving appropriate services.

By 1999, African-Americans made up only 13 percent of the U.S. population but accounted for 43 percent of all new AIDS cases.

Minority Leaders Work to Address AIDS. In the mid-1990s, the prevalence of AIDS rose to alarming levels in some minority communities.

Many advocates and people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) who pressed so tirelessly for Federal action in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic did not live long enough to see the second.

In 1996, in a major victory for the HIV/AIDS community, the Ryan White CARE Act was reauthorized through the year 2000.

In December 1995, encouraging clinical trial results moved the FDA to quickly approve a new drug to be used in combination with others.

In a development that would forever change the HIV/AIDS treatment landscape, the FDA approved an open label study of saquinavir in June 1995.

HRSA Launches Massive Effort to Disseminate Findings. Findings from the AIDS Clinical Trial Group (ACTG) 076 demonstrated that with a particular regimen of AZT (zidovudine), the incidence of perinatal HIV transmission plummeted from 22.6 to 7.6 percent.

With AIDS incidence and mortality skyrocketing, seven more metropolitan regions became eligible for Title I (Part A) funding as Eligible Metropolitan Areas (EMAs), bringing the total number of EMAs to 25.

In the 6 years following the launch of its first AIDS program, one of HRSA’s top priorities was to take HIV/AIDS service delivery knowledge back into the community.

With ink barely dry on the new Ryan White CARE Act, HRSA distributed its first grants in April 1991.

The Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act of 1990 brought hope in an environment of loss.

On August 18, 1990, by wide bipartisan margins, both houses of Congress passed the groundbreaking Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act, named for an Indiana teen who lost his life to AIDS. By the time the bill became law, more than 150,000 U.S. AIDS cases had been reported in the United States. More than 100,000 had died.*

In fiscal year 1989, HRSA appropriated a total of $3.9 million in Low Prevalence Planning Grants to 22 grantees.

Funding Set at $5 Million for First Year. In the first years of HIV/AIDS, some believed that perinatal transmission was not a risk factor for HIV. In his blockbuster book, And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts documents a meeting in which a clinician reporting HIV infection among his infant patients was regarded with suspicion.

On March 20, 1987, the HIV/AIDS community received news that a powerful breakthrough in HIV treatment had been achieved.

The AIDS Service Demonstration Grants marked HRSA’s first AIDS-specific health initiative.

On the morning of May 16, 1990, as the Senate prepared to debate, the Senate Chaplain Reverend Richard C. Halverson, D.D. noted in his morning prayer that "rarely will the Senate be called upon to deal with an issue more complicated by prejudice, fear, and emotion, nor more presently or potentially destructive, than the issue of AIDS."