The 1990s Medicine and Health: Chronology

1990:     February 5 Smoking is banned on all U.S. domestic flights lasting less than six hours.

1990:     March 9 Antonia Novello becomes the first woman and the first Hispanic American U.S. Surgeon General.

1990:     September 14 U.S. geneticist W. French Anderson performs the first gene therapy on a human, injecting engineered genes into a four-yearold child to repair her faulty immune system.

1991:     April 19 President George H. W. Bush is hospitalized overnight with atrial fibrillation (abnormal heartbeat).

1991:     November 7 Earvin "Magic" Johnson announces that he has contracted the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and retires from professional basketball.

1991:     November 20 Jack Kevorkian's medical license is suspended in Michigan in hopes of preventing him from assisting in any more patient suicides.

1992:      An American Academy of Pediatrics task force recommends that babies be placed on their backs to sleep, leading to a decrease in reported cases of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

1992:     June 15 Earvin Johnson III, son of Magic and Cookie Johnson, is born. Mother and child are both HIV negative.

1993:     September 8 Joycelyn Elders becomes the first African American U.S. Surgeon General.

1993:     October 27 Embryologist Jerry Hall of George Washington University reports the first cloning of a human embryo.

1993:     October 27 President Bill Clinton's 1,342-page Health Plan is delivered to the U.S. Congress.

1994:     November In an open letter to the American public, former president Ronald Reagan announces that he has Alzheimer's disease.

1994:     December 15 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) permits the first U.S. test of RU-486, an abortion-inducing pill, in Des Moines, Iowa.

1994:     December 31 Joycelyn Elders is forced to resign as Surgeon General following her controversial remarks about sex education, abortion, and drugs.

1995:     March The FDA approves the first U.S. vaccine to prevent chicken pox, a disease afflicting 3.7 million people each year.

1995:     March 6 Olympic gold-medal diver Greg Louganis announces he is HIV positive in his autobiography, Breaking the Surface.

1995:     June 12 Actor Christopher Reeve is hospitalized with a neck fracture, spinal injury, and paralysis after a horseback-riding accident.

1996:     May 13 The FDA approves the first new antiobesity drug in twenty-three years. In August 1997, the FDA will rescind its approval of the drug after the death of several diet patients.

1996:     May 14 Jack Kevorkian is acquitted in a Pontiac, Michigan, court of assisted suicide charges for the third time.

1996:     November Massachusetts legislators pass the first state law to permit consumers unlimited access to basic background information about physicians, including medical malpractice data.

1997:     January 1 David Da-i Ho is named "Man of the Year" by Time magazine for his AIDS research.

1997:     August 18 In DeForest, Wisconsin, ABS Global Inc. announces the birth of Gene, the first bull calf cloned from fetal stem cells.

1998:     August 19 Nushawn Williams, a twenty-year-old New York man, is indicted on charges of felony reckless endangerment and attempted assault for knowingly exposing a fifteen-year-old girl to HIV while having sexual intercourse.

1998:     September 2 The FDA approves the Preven Emergency Contraceptive Kit, which includes high-dosage birth control pills that prevent pregnancy if taken up to seventy-two hours after sexual intercourse.

1999:     March 26 Jack Kevorkian is found guilty of second-degree murder and the delivery of a controlled substance by a Michigan jury and is sentenced to serve ten to twenty-five years in prison.

1999:     December 1 Scientists from the United States, Japan, and England announce completion of the first mapping of an entire human genome, part of the Human Genome Project.

1999:     December 28 Rhode Island becomes the last state in the country to approve the use of prescription drugs as an alternative to surgical abortion.