Nate Mendel Quotes

Certainly the support for research in HIV/AIDS was good in the Clinton administration, good in the Bush administrations. It just was.

I lost relatives to AIDS. A couple of my closest cousins, favorite cousins. I lost friends to AIDS, high school friends who never even made it to their 21st birthdays in the '80s. When it's that close to you, you can't - you know, you can't really deny it, and you can't run from it.

I have had lots of friends who've been affected by Aids and a very good friend of mine, Oscar Moore, died of Aids and I was with him in his last year quite a bit. And of course he was a man living in a very rich culture with a wealthy family who was able to afford health care.

Those who are trying to remain healthy with HIV/AIDS are in the most vulnerable period of their lives; that's no time to leave them without access to care.

More people with HIV/Aids are getting inexpensive anti-retroviral drugs, and their life expectancy has increased, but universal access is still far off, and the disease is still spreading, if more slowly than before.

The lesson is the same as it always has been to the HIV/AIDS community: embrace and celebrate the progress while not letting up the pressure until there is a cure.

Those of us who lived through the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s have a very special spot in our heart for home-based health care.

Let us give publicity to H.I.V./AIDS and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like a normal illness like TB, like cancer, is always to come out and say somebody has died because of H.I.V./AIDS, and people will stop regarding it as something extraordinary.

A lot of people in my world - in the acting world - have either lost friends to Aids or live with HIV because its origin in our culture, in New York for instance, was in the gay community.

From 1989 to 2000, I was focusing in on my children. I hadn't realized the world had changed a lot. AIDS had happened, for starters, and so many people in the arts died or were affected.

I lost relatives to AIDS, a couple of my closest cousins. I lost friends to AIDS, high-school friends who never even made it to their 21st birthdays in the '80s. When it's that close to you, you can't really deny it, and you can't run from it.

I'm over there filming in South Africa now, and two in five are HIV-positive now. Not many people know that.

Peter Jennings came to us and said to make a PSA, 'Let's Talk About AIDS.' But I was naive about how the virus is contracted - until Magic Johnson came out. I'd stereotyped it, thinking it was a gay disease, a white man's disease.

Being part of the Queen story and knowing what Freddie Mercury went through before he died of AIDS has really shown me how far we've come in fighting this disease.

Too many people have already lost their lives to HIV and AIDS, and the more celebrities who can bring attention to the issue, the better.

HIV/AIDS is a very big problem in my country South Africa, so I hope to stand as an advocate for that.

I want to be incredibly clear: The United States stands for a public health approach to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Although it may seem callous to say so, millions of Americans are lucky that Magic Johnson was infected with H.I.V. There is no way of calculating how many lives he has saved. No advertising agency could have invented a better, or more effective, role model.

The important thing is this Just because I'm doing well doesn't mean that they're going to do well if they get HIV. A lot of people have died since I have announced. This disease is not going anywhere.

HIV infection and AIDS is growing - but so too is public apathy. We have already lost too many friends and colleagues.

The challenges surrounding HIV and AIDS are getting more complex and mature, and we just can't stick our heads in the sand and say 'it can't happen to me.'

Reiterating the belief that HIV is the cause of AIDS is an easy thing to do. Understanding the science and politics of the situation is much more complicated and requires study with a critical and open mind.

There are a number of candidate vaccines that are in development for HIV/AIDS.

I feel strongly about HIV/AIDS and children because I'm a famous singer, a public figure, and I'm a female and a mother. I have the responsibility and the passion to help out and do whatever I can.

When I first found out I had HIV, I had to find somebody who was living with it, who could help me understand my journey and what I was going to have to deal with day-to-day. I found out that a person named Elizabeth Frazier was living with AIDS at the time, and so I called her up, and she took a meeting with me.