Two decades since Magic Johnson’s HIV announcement

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDNov 8 2011

It is 20 years since basket ball legend Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson, now 52 years-old, retired from the Lakers basketball team while announcing his diagnosis of HIV, a virus that causes AIDS.

Johnson said in the news conference, “I just want to make it clear, first of all, that I do not have the AIDS disease.” He told the Los Angeles Times, “the virus is still in my body, but it's asleep.”

Back 20 years, people believed that Magic Johnson wouldn’t live very long. In the 1991 press conference for the announcement of Magic Johnson retiring he stated, “I plan on going on living for a long time. I guess now I get to enjoy some of the other sides of living.”

However adequate medicinal therapy has enabled him to survive longer than what most people imagined. He takes the same kinds of drugs that other people who are diagnosed with HIV take. “I think sometimes we think, well, only gay people can get it – ‘It’s not going to happen to me’. And here I am saying that it can happen to anybody, even me, Magic Johnson,” he stated in the press conference in 1991.

Only months later, in 1992, Magic Johnson went back to play in the NBA All-Star game and became a member of the U.S. Dream Team in the Olympics. Then he would retire again before the 1995-96 season. Johnson recently said that he regretted retiring for the second time.

Johnson created the Magic Johnson Foundation to help educate people about HIV and AIDS. It has raised millions of dollars for HIV and AIDS outreach. The Magic Johnson Foundation has full-service treatment centers in three locations in California; Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland and one in Jacksonville, Florida., that offer free or low-cost health care for those dealing with the virus. According to their website, they have tested nearly 30,000 people and given 1,000 positive diagnoses for the virus.

Almost 1.2 million people are still living with HIV today and 1 out of 5 of them do not even know they are infected with the disease. The Centers for Disease Control still reports that Blacks have the highest rank among racial groups in the U.S. to be infected with the HIV virus.

AIDS researcher Dr. David Ho explained to CBS News, “In 1991, about 10 years into the known epidemic, there were still only a few medications that could be used to treat HIV infections, so most people went on to die within a few years of diagnosis. And Magic Johnson felt no different from anybody else.” Ho said, “We also knew we working on new drugs, some of which could be turned into medications for our patients, and it was only a matter of time before some of them would come into play for him.”