The HIV epidemic: social and historical perspectives

Because I have lectured about this subject I have a lot of graphics, but I ' ll try to keep it reasonable. The first report of what turned out to be AIDS was published in CDC ' s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on June 5, 1981. It reported on five cases ofPneumocystiscariniipneumonia in young men in California. This is a microbe that only causes disease in people with weakened immune systems.  After at first calling the mystery disease Gay Related Immunodeficiency Disease, or GRID, epidemiologists quickly renamed it Acquired immune Deficiency Syndrome,  or AIDS. It was particularly prevalent among gay men in the U.S., but it soon became evident that you didn ' t have to be gay to get AIDS and that in fact, in Africa, it was prevalent among heterosexual men and women.  It would be three more years before a retrovirus was identified as the cause of AIDS. It was discovered independently in two laboratories in the U.S. and one in France. The discoverers argued about what to call it and who was first, but eventually to share the credit and call it Human Immunodeficiency Virus, HIV. Unfortunately, knowing the cause didn ' t lead to a vaccine, and didn ' t lead to any effective treatment until 1996, another 13 years. In the meantime the disease wreaked devastation, particularly in gay communities in North America and Europe, and widely in sub-Saharan Africa.  HIV infection is strongly associated with social and economic disadvantage. Skipping over...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs