WVXU: After decades of efforts, researchers hope they're closer to a functional cure for HIV

"It was very scary times and it was very hard on patients and healthcare providers," Fichtenbaum said of the early days of HIV. "We didn't know very much, we weren't sure how it was transmitted in the early days. There was a lot of stigma attached to it, and we had few treatments. We weren't sure how to treat all the infections, we weren't sure how to prevent them, so there was a lot of fear."

Fichtenbaum said a lot of early patients with AIDS in the 1980s faced a lot of discrimination, including from some healthcare providers. He said that was when he decided he was going to make it his passion and his mission in life because he wanted to help people. 

Fichtenbaum said 40-plus year into the fight against AIDS, a variety of medications have been developed but there is still more work to do to make them completely effective. 

"Our medications, unfortunately, stop the virus when it is trying to reproduce itself, but not when the virus is sleeping," he said. "We also have medications that people can take every day or sometimes an injection even that can prevent HIV from being acquired by somebody. So we have ways of preventing it, and we haven't been able to spread these methods in ways that it needs to be spread. That's the human factor, the organizational factor, the inadequacy of our public health system to really address health prevention problems."

Listen to the entire story here.

Read more about Fichtenbaum's mission of social justice through medicine here.