When was AIDS identified for the first time?
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was first recognized as a new disease in 1981 when increasing numbers of young homosexual men succumbed to unusual opportunistic infections and rare malignancies (CDC 1981; Greene 2007).
Who was the first human to have AIDS?
To date, the earliest known case of HIV-1 infection in human blood is from a sample taken in 1959 from a man who'd died in Kinshasa in what was then the Belgian Congo.
What was AIDS known as before?
The same opportunistic infections were also reported among hemophiliacs, users of intravenous drugs such as heroin, and Haitian immigrants—leading some researchers to call it the "4H" disease. By August 1982, the disease was being referred to by its new CDC-coined name: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).
Who was the first person with STDS?
The first known case in North American was a 16 year old named Robert Rayford. He presented with fever, all manner of warts and sores, swollen testicles, and a depleted immune system. The year was 1968, and doctors were baffled.
Overview
AIDS is caused by a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which originated in non-human primates in Central and West Africa. While various sub-groups of the virus acquired human infectivity at different times, the present pandemic had its origins in the emergence of one specific strain – HIV-1 subgroup M – in Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the 1920s.
Transmission from non-humans to humans
Research in this area is conducted using molecular phylogenetics, comparing viral genomic sequences to determine relatedness.
Scientists generally accept that the known strains (or groups) of HIV-1 are most closely related to the simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs) endemic in wild ape populations of West Central African forests. In particular, each of the known HIV-1 strains is either closely related to the SIV that infe…
Emergence
The discovery of the main HIV/SIV phylogenetic relationships permits explaining broad HIV biogeography: the early centres of the HIV-1 groups were in Central Africa, where the primate reservoirs of the related SIVcpz and SIVgor viruses (chimpanzees and gorillas) exist; similarly, the HIV-2 groups had their centres in West Africa, where sooty mangabeys, which harbour the related SIVsmm virus, exist. However, these relationships do not explain more detailed patterns of biog…
Pathogenicity of SIV in non-human primates
In most non-human primate species, natural SIV infection does not cause a fatal disease (but see below). Comparison of the gene sequence of SIV with HIV should, therefore, provide information about the factors necessary to cause disease in humans. The factors that determine the virulence of HIV as compared to most SIVs are only now being elucidated. Non-human SIVs contain a nef gene that down-regulates CD3, CD4, and MHC class I expression; most non-human SIVs, therefo…
History of spread
David Carr was an apprentice printer (usually mistakenly referred to as a sailor; Carr had served in the Navy between 1955 and 1957) from Manchester, England who died on August 31, 1959, and was for some time mistakenly reported to have died from AIDS-defining opportunistic infections (ADOIs). Following the failure of his immune system, he succumbed to pneumonia. Doctors, baffled by what he had died from, preserved 50 of his tissue samples for inspection. In …
Activism by AIDS patients and families
In New York City, Nathan Fain, Larry Kramer, Larry Mass, Paul Popham, Paul Rapoport, and Edmund White officially established the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) in 1982.
Also in 1982, Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz published How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach. In this short work, they described ways gay men could be sexual and affectionate while dramatically reducing the risk of contracting or spreading HIV. Both authors were themselves ga…
Identification of the virus
In May 1983, a team of doctors at the Pasteur Institute in France including Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier reported that they had isolated a new retrovirus from lymphoid ganglions that they believed was the cause of AIDS. The virus was later named lymphadenopathy-associated virus (LAV) and a sample was sent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which was later passed to the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
Case definition for epidemiological surveillance
Since June 5, 1981, many definitions have been developed for epidemiological surveillance such as the Bangui definition and the 1994 expanded World Health Organization AIDS case definition.
Overview
This is a timeline of AIDS, including AIDS cases before 1980.
Pre-1980s
Researchers estimate that some time in the early 20th century, a form of Simian immunodeficiency virus found in chimpanzees (SIVcpz) first entered humans in Central Africa and began circulating in Léopoldville (modern-day Kinshasa) by the 1920s. This gave rise to the pandemic form of HIV (HIV-1 group M); other zoonotic transmissions led to the other, less prevalent, subtypes of HIV.
1980s
1980
• April 24, San Francisco resident (and supposed gay sex worker) Ken Horne is reported to the Center for Disease Control with Kaposi's sarcoma (KS). Later in 1981, the CDC would retroactively identify him as the first patient of the AIDS epidemic in the US. He also had Cryptococcus.
1990s
1990
• January 6, British actor Ian Charleson dies from AIDS at the age of 40—the first show-business death in the United Kingdom openly attributed to complications from AIDS.
• February 16, New York artist and social activist Keith Haring dies from AIDS-related illness.
2000s
2000
• World Health Organization estimates between 15% and 20% of new HIV infections worldwide are the result of blood transfusions, where the donors were not screened or inadequately screened for HIV.
• February 23, Israeli singer Ofra Haza died in Tel Aviv of AIDS-related pneumonia.
2010s
2010
• Confirmation is published that the first patient cured of HIV, Timothy Ray Brown, still has a negative HIV status, four years after treatment.
2012
• The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves Truvada for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrE…
2020s
• COVID-19 pandemic
• The United Nations held the 2021 high-level meeting on HIV/AIDS.
• City of Hope doctors announced that a fourth person in history has been cured of HIV through a stem cell transplant. The patient had cancer, of which he has also been cured. But the doctors warned the procedure cannot be made available on a large scale.
See also
• History of HIV/AIDS
• Timeline of early HIV/AIDS cases