Learning from the past

As I read the excellent And the Band Played On - Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts, I'm getting increasingly frustrated at the people of yesteryear - but not that far ago - who refused to budge from the status quo. More specifically, I'm frustrated at the account of how the people in charge of blood banks in 1983 by and large did not test donated blood for immune abnormalities or markers of Hepatitis B infection, and in fact seemed (at least by this account) to be downright resistant and firmly opposed to taking on these basic practices.
These tests were available at the time, and one particular blood bank did use them to screen donors' blood and reject blood that contained HepB core antibodies or skewed CD4 to CD8 T cell ratios (a sign of some stages of HIV infection), but by and large most blood banks refused to test blood, which has led to a significant number of people being infected with HIV (or HepB, or probably quite a number of other viruses as well) from blood transfusions. As someone who reads this 31 years later, where donated blood (at least in Canada) is tested and prospective donors are screened through a risk-reduction questionnaire, it's incredibly frustrating to read about people actively rejecting what's considered standard, basic practice today.
What probably - certainly - didn't help was that, as And the Band Played On repeatedly emphasized, mainstream media ignored the AIDS epidemic when it mostly affected marginalized populations. Without media coverage, the majority of the population didn't know what was going on, and without that knowledge public pressure couldn't be put on institutions and governments to take substantial action to curb the epidemic.

Now, hindsight is 20/20, and the best that I/we can do is learn from past mistakes - whether ours or others' - and move forward with those lessons in mind. For me, this has raised many questions: what health, human issues are going on in the world that the media's currently ignoring? What issues could be greatly improved with the appropriate actions from industries or public institutions? And perhaps most importantly, how?