Ryan White, American activist, inspired the Ryan White Care Act (born 1971)

Ryan Wayne White 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.

The Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act was an act of the United States Congress and is the largest federally funded program in the United States for people living with HIV/AIDS. The act made federal funding available through contingency grants to states for low-income, uninsured, and under-insured people to be treated with the chemotherapeutic drug AZT. The act is named in honor of Ryan White, an Indiana teenager who contracted HIV through a tainted blood transfusion. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1984 at age 13 and was subsequently expelled from school because of the disease. White became a well-known advocate for AIDS research and awareness until his death in 1990 at age 18.