History of Aids
Although the new epidemic that would eventually be named Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was first recognized as a disease in 1981, we now know that human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) probably jumped from chimpanzees to humans during the late 1600s. The first actually confirmed death from HIV was in 1959, when a man died in the Congo in Africa. This was confirmed by analyzing samples of his blood in a recent test.

The first published article related to AIDS was in 1981. The principal author’s name was Michael Gottlieb and it appeared in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for June 5th. This article reported that there was a random increase in pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a rare lung infection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noticed it when a drug technician named Sandra Ford noticed that there was an unusually high number of requests for the drug that treated PCP."A doctor was treating a gay man in his 20s who had pneumonia. Two weeks later, he called to ask for a refill of a rare drug that I handled. This was unusual - nobody ever asked for a refill. Patients usually were cured in one 10-day treatment or they died."-Sandra Ford for Newsweek

A short while later, on July 3rd, another article reported eight outbreaks of Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KS) in young homosexual males in New York. This was surprising because Kaposi’s Sarcoma was a rare form of cancer that normally showed up in older people. At this time, the medical community realized that a new disease was probably heading their way.

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