Mark Kirk: “Mr. Chairman, in 1985 and 1986, Abbott Laboratories and others invented the AIDS test. It was our first look at the kind…”

“Mr. Chairman, in 1985 and 1986, Abbott Laboratories and others invented the AIDS test. It was our first look at the kind of less expensive ways to find the proteins that identified the HIV virus. In an unprecedented donation by private industry, Abbott and others donated the test to the World Health Organization that looked at whether the popular wisdom at the time was correct: Was this a Haitian-New York-San Francisco epidemic, or was this something else? I received a phone call as a staffer for John Porter in this House giving me the first results of what the test showed. The indications from the Central Hospital in Kinshasa, Zaire, showed a 10 percent serial positive rate, which indicated that this was not a Haitian-San Francisco-New York epidemic. It was an African epidemic and had been going on for quite some time to get serial positive rates at that level. We reached out across the aisle to Congressman Bob Mrazek of Long Island, and John Porter and Bob Mrazek came together to say we should earmark a disease fund, the first ever in the foreign operations bill, to fight AIDS. Initially the leaders of the committee at the time fought us and said it would be over their dead body that we would start this program. So we arranged that. And to their credit, the leaders of the committee changed their minds. The Global AIDS Program was born in 1987 with an appropriation of $30 million.”