And The Band Played On

The movie And the Band Played On focuses on the struggle of the CDC during the early
to mid-1980s as they sought funding for research into a disease that had no proper name nor
could be identified. Brought on to the team was Dr. Don Francis, who had gained some
recognition for his work in Africa during a breakout of Ebola Fever, where he had witnessed the
horror caused by that disease. Now working on the new epidemic hitting the gay populace of
America, Dr. Francis finds himself steeped in a bureaucratic nightmare as Reagans
administration seeks to cut funding to all things not military, making funding for proper testing
of tissue and blood samples obsolete. Realizing the disease is likely a retrovirus, by linking it to
the other diseases that present in its victims, they convince Dr. Robert Gallo to aid in the testing
by alluding to the idea the disease may have been the one he was looking for to make a concrete
argument for the retrovirus he had discovered, HTLV. Seeing the possibility for a Nobel Prize
Dr. Gallo took on the case. Meanwhile, in France, Dr. Montagnier, who had dealt with the first
known case of AIDS a few years prior, received the case notes and a tissue sample from Dr.
Francis. With this in hand, Dr. Montagnier proved that AIDS was indeed a retrovirus and even
had it image mapped using an electron microscope. Dr. Gallo, responding to the news that the
French had cracked this disease, cut off funding for the CDC research of AIDS. In a legal sweep,
Dr. Gallo is able to get himself recognized as a discoverer of the disease alongside the French
researchers which did most of the leg work and the CDC which gave the French the final piece
of the puzzle. The movie ends with Dr. Francis being reassigned to San Francisco and the
French preventing Dr. Gallo from making a move to be the sole discoverer of the disease.
In my research of the information provided by the movie, the disease progresses exactly
as they say it does, which unsurprising since the movie is a docudrama about the initial discovery

of AIDS and the battle to identify the disease. According to the Mayo Clinic, when the disease
has progressed far enough, the patient will begin to experience flu-like symptoms including
fever, headache, muscle aches, rash, chills, sore throat, mouth or genital ulcers, swollen lymph
glands, mainly on the neck, joint pain, night sweats, and diarrhea. This was surprising to me,
because when I took sex-ed I was told that HIV/AIDS had no physical symptoms and all that it
did was allow opportunistic infections to take hold much more readily. Of course, now that I
know that HIV/AIDS does, in fact, have symptoms all of its own it helps to change my mentality
about the disease (although not its victims, which Ive understood since the very same sex-ed
class arent to be treated any differently as HIV/AIDS doesnt readily transfer from regular
contact). Another thing which surprised me about this movie was just how ready the medical
science community to tear itself apart. I knew that, since the rise of communism in the USSR,
our own society became more extreme in its view about enterprise changing many fields which
traditionally werent business oriented into businesses, but I had always assumed that the
transition in the medical community took place at the end of the 80s not the 70s.
Other accuracies of the movie include how the disease is transmitted and the risk factors
of for transmission. In the beginning of the movie they had not known many of the factors of the
disease, however as the movie progressed and more people were contracting the disease outside
of the original communities which were infected the CDC was able to determine that the disease
is primarily transmitted by sex, but may also be contracted from the sharing of needles amongst
drug users, rarely from blood transfusions, and rarely from other bodily fluids not including
saliva. This was not changed from the actual findings of the CDC as released in their report
HIV and its Transmission.

Works Cited
And the Band Played On. Dir. Roger Spottiswoode. Perf. Matthew Modine, Alan Alda, and
Patrick Bauchau. HBO Pictures, 1993. Film.
Diseases and Conditions of HIV/AIDS. Mayo Clinic. mayoclinic.org, 20 May 2014. Web. 1
June 2015.
HIV and its Transmission. CDC. n.p., 23 Sept. 2003. Web. 30 Mar. 2015.