Ryan White

Ryan Wayne White (December 6, 1971 – April 8, 1990) was an American teenager from Kokomo, Indiana, who became a national poster child for HIV/AIDS in the United States after his school barred him from attending classes following a diagnosis of AIDS.

Among hemophiliacs treated with blood-clotting factors between 1979 and 1984, nearly 90% became infected with HIV and/or hepatitis C.

At the time of his diagnosis, his T-cell count had dropped to 25 per cubic millimetre (a healthy individual without HIV will have around 500–1,200; below 200 is AIDS-defining in the U.S.).

Doctors predicted Ryan White had only six months to live.

During the 1980s, AIDS was largely stigmatized as an illness impacting the gay community.

In the U.S., that perception shifted with the media focus placed on White and other prominent heterosexual HIV-infected people such as Magic Johnson, Arthur Ashe and the Ray brothers, although these cases were often framed as "innocent" against gay men who were seen as "guilty" subjects.

The means of transmission of HIV had not yet been fully understood by the mid- to late 1980s.

Scientists knew it spread via blood and was not transmittable by any sort of casual contact (such as shaking hands or being in the same room), but as recently as 1983, the American Medical Association had thought that "Evidence Suggests Household Contact May Transmit AIDS", and the belief that the disease could easily spread persisted.

Children with AIDS were still rare; at the time of White's rejection from school, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention knew of only 148 cases of pediatric AIDS in the United States.

Many families in Kokomo believed his presence posed an unacceptable risk.

As a haemophiliac, he became infected with HIV from a contaminated factor VIII blood treatment and, when diagnosed in December 1984, was given six months to live.

Doctors said he posed no risk to other students, as AIDS is not an airborne disease and spreads solely through bodily fluids, but AIDS was poorly understood by the general public at the time.

When White tried to return to school, many parents and teachers in Howard County rallied against his attendance due to unwarranted concerns of the disease spreading to other students and staff.

A lengthy administrative appeal process ensued, and news of the conflict turned White into a popular celebrity and advocate for AIDS research and public education.

Surprising his doctors, White lived five years longer than predicted.

Healthy for most of his childhood, White became extremely ill with pneumonia in December 1984.

On December 17, 1984, during a lung biopsy, White was diagnosed with AIDS.

By this time the scientific community had studied the epidemic in great detail.

Earlier that year, HTLV-III was identified and isolated by American research scientists, confirming the work done by French research scientists who called it LAV.

A lengthy public battle to determine who should be recognized as the discoverer of the human retrovirus delayed development of a test for what would later be called HIV.

White had apparently received a contaminated treatment of factor VIII that was infected with HIV, as did thousands of other Americans with hemophilia and hemophiliacs around the world.

At that time, because the virus had only recently been identified and there was no screening of blood products, much of the pooled factor VIII concentrate was tainted.

Blood banks and pharmaceutical companies dismissed calls by the CDC to use a hepatitis B test as a surrogate until an HIV test could be developed.

Later plasma products were screened and heat-treated to deactivate both HIV and hepatitis.

After the diagnosis, White was too ill to return to school, but by early 1985 he began to feel better.

His mother asked if he could return to school, but was told by school officials that he could not.

On June 30, 1985, a formal request to permit re-admittance to school was denied by Western School Corporation superintendent James O. Smith, sparking an administrative appeal process that lasted for over nine months.

Western Middle School in Russiaville faced enormous pressure from many parents and faculty to prevent White from returning to the campus after his diagnosis became widely known.

In the school of 360 total students, 117 parents and 50 teachers signed a petition encouraging school leaders to ban White from school.

Due to the widespread fear and ignorance of AIDS, the principal and later the school board succumbed to this pressure and prohibited re-admittance.

The White family filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the decision.

The Whites initially filed suit in the U.S. District Court in Indianapolis.

The court, however, declined to hear the case until administrative appeals had been resolved.

On November 25, an Indiana Department of Education officer ruled that the school must follow the Indiana Board of Health guidelines and that White must be allowed to attend school.

He died on April 8, 1990, one month before his high school graduation.

The U.S. Congress passed a major piece of AIDS legislation, the Ryan White CARE Act, shortly after White's death, which was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in August 1990.

The act has been reauthorized twice; Ryan White programs are the largest provider of services for people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States.

Ryan White was born at St. Joseph Memorial Hospital in Kokomo, Indiana, to Hubert Wayne and Jeanne Elaine (Hale) White.

When he was circumcised, the bleeding would not stop and when he was three days old, doctors diagnosed him with severe hemophilia A, a hereditary blood coagulation disorder associated with the X chromosome, which causes even minor injuries to result in severe bleeding.

For treatment, he received weekly infusions of factor VIII, a blood product created from pooled plasma of non-hemophiliacs, an increasingly common treatment for hemophiliacs at the time.