AIDS

HISTORY

In 1981 The New England Journal of Medicine reported a new rare and fatal disease that had killed 95 people, mostly homosexual men. The disease later would be called AIDS.

The Associated Press ran its first story about AIDS on July 3, 1981. "Doctors in New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer," Lawrence K. Altman’s article began. "Eight of the victims died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made."

On October 8, 1981, public health nurse Bobbi Campbell became the 16th person in San Francisco to be diagnosed with Kaposi's sarcoma, when that was a proxy for an AIDS diagnosis. He was the first to publicly identify as a person living with what was to become known as HIV/AIDS.

Newsweek cover, August 8, 1983, showing Bobbi Campbell (left) and lover Bobby Hilliard

AIDS was originally known as Gay-related immune deficiency (GRID).

AIDS day is December 1st, in recognition of the day the AIDS virus was officially recognized on December 1, 1981.

A team of researchers led by French virologist Luc Montagnier published their discovery of HIV on May 20, 1983. At the time they were uncertain that it caused AIDS. However, further research by Montagnier and others soon confirmed that HIV was the cause of AIDS.

Montagnier's team isolated the virus from a patient with AIDS and named it lymphadenopathy-associated virus (LAV). They showed that the virus could infect and kill human T cells, which are a type of white blood cell that are important for the immune system. They also showed that the virus could be transmitted through blood, semen, and vaginal fluids.

In 1984, another team of researchers led by Robert Gallo at the National Cancer Institute in the United States also isolated a virus that they called human T-cell lymphotropic virus III (HTLV-III). It was later shown that HTLV-III and LAV were the same virus.

The discovery of HIV was a major breakthrough in the fight against AIDS. It led to the development of blood tests to screen for the virus, and it also paved the way for the development of antiretroviral drugs that can suppress the virus and prevent AIDS from developing.

Scientists estimate HIV came to the U.S. from Haiti in 1970 or 1971, but it went undetected by doctors for years.

13-year-old Ryan White was denied re-admittance to his school on June 30, 1985, following a diagnosis of AIDS he had contracted during treatments for hemophilia; 117 parents and 50 teachers had petitioned for his ban. People even cancelled their subscriptions as White was the paperboy and they believed they would be infected via newsprint. His legal battle made him a poster child for the disease in the U.S.

On March 20, 1987 the US Food and Drug Administration approved the antiretroviral drug zidovudine (AZT), the first antiviral medication approved for use against HIV and AIDS. The paucity of alternatives for treating HIV/AIDS at that time meant the drug's side-effect of transient anemia and malaise outweighed the slow, disfiguring, and painful death from HIV. AZT was subsequently approved unanimously for infants and children three years later.

AZT in oral, injectable, and suppository form

In the late 1980s, young punk rockers in Cuba, known as “los frikis,” were so fed-up with the stifling life of the communist regime that they chose to inject themselves with the AIDS virus so they could live in a sanitarium and be free from constant police-state harassment.

In April 1987, Princess Diana opened the UK's first purpose built HIV/Aids unit that exclusively cared for patients infected with the virus, at London Middlesex Hospital. In front of the world's media, Princess Diana shook the hand of a man suffering with the illness, without wearing gloves. In doing so she challenged the belief that AIDS could be passed via contact. The act was seen as a huge moment for those suffering with the disease.

Pope John Paul II embraced an AIDS-infected boy while visiting San Francisco on September 17, 1987.The pope drove past several groups of angry protesters in order to embrace the teary-eyed 4-year-old Brendan O'Rourke, who had contracted the disease through a blood transfusion. He then assured all AIDS victims of God's love for them.

In its January 1988 issue, Cosmopolitan ran a feature claiming that women had almost no reason to worry about contracting HIV. The piece claimed that unprotected sex with an HIV-positive man did not put women at risk of infection and went on to state that "most heterosexuals are not at risk".

During the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s, Ruth Coker Burks used her salary as a real estate agent to provide support, medication and palliative care for more than a thousand AIDS patients whose families had abandoned them, and for some, burying them in her own family cemetery in Arkansas.

The actor Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates in Psycho), discovered he was HIV positive in 1990 after reading an article by the National Enquirer in the grocery line claiming he was. It's suspected the nurse treating him for facial palsy secretly obtained his blood samples and had them tested for the virus, leaking the news to the tabloids. Perkins died on September 12, 1992, from AIDS-related pneumonia at age 60.

Perkins in 1983. By NL-HaNA, ANEFO / neg. stroken, 1945-1989,

Basketball star Magic Johnson announced on November 7, 1991 that he had tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS, thus ending his career in the NBA. His public announcement of his HIV-positive status helped dispel the stereotype, still widely held at the time, that HIV was a "gay disease" that heterosexuals need not worry about.

The largest mass mailing in American history was the 1998 Understanding AIDS pamphlet. 126 million pamphlets were sent out hoping to reach every household in the USA. It contained information to avoid AIDS and encouraged the reader not to fear day-to-day contact with people with AIDS.

Continuum, a magazine devoted to the idea that AIDS is a conspiracy, went out of print in 2001 after both the editors died of AIDS.

It wasn't a single drug discovery that stopped people from dying of AIDS in the 1990s but the discovery that combining several drugs would each affect a different aspect of HIV and together force the virus into undetectable remission, called the "AIDS cocktail" 

The American President George W Bush announced in 2003 a $15 billion package in combating the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Around 23.8 million people there are currently HIV positive and over one million die annually.

Gambia’s president Yahya Jammeh announced in 2007 that he had found a cure for Aids made from boiled herbs.

Timothy Ray Brown is the first person ever cured of HIV. He was diagnosed with the disease in 1995 and was cured in 2007 with a bone marrow transplant from someone with genes resistant to HIV.

The AIDS Memorial Quilt, is an enormous quilt made as a memorial to celebrate the lives of people who have died of AIDS-related causes. Its first public display was on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights on October 11, 2007. Weighing an estimated 54 tons, it is the largest piece of community folk art in the world.

Despite testing positive for HIV in 1992, Christine Maggiore became a prominent advocate for HIV/AIDS denialism. She founded Alive and Well, an organization that disputed the link between HIV and AIDS. Her views were widely criticized by the medical community. Maggiore died on December 27, 2008 at the age of 52 from AIDS-related complications. 

In 2008, almost 7,300 people were diagnosed with HIV in the United Kingdom — three times the number diagnosed ten years earlier — and more than half of those people contracted the virus through heterosexual sex. Women accounted for 2,684 of that number.

Because of medical advancements, HIV sufferer life expectancy went from 39 in 1996 to 72 in 2011 with appropriate medication.

It was revealed in 2014 that the global 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.

When the actor Charlie Sheen came out as HIV positive on November 17, 2015, it led to a 95 percent increase in over the counter HIV home testing kits and 2.75 million searches on the topic, dubbed "The Charlie Sheen Effect." Some said that Sheen did more for awareness of HIV than most United Nations events.

Prince Harry took a HIV test live on July 14, 2016 to show how easy it is. It was hailed as a "groundbreaking moment in the fight against HIV." HIV awareness group THT subsequently reported a 5 fold increase in the number of orders of HIV self-tests following the prince's broadcast.

FACTS

The HIV virus is coated in sugar to trick the body into not recognizing it as a foreign entity.

Early diagnosis is crucial if treatment for HIV is going to be at its most effective. Despite this, 36 per cent of women who test positive in the UK are at an advanced stage by the time they are diagnosed.

AIDS Clinic, McLeod Ganj, Himachal Pradesh, India, 2010

Women are twice as likely to acquire HIV from men during sexual intercourse than vice versa.

Ninety five per cent of British women are not routinely tested for HIV and Aids, with 60 per cent thinking that these issues do not affect women in their community.

As of 2019, AIDS has killed between 24.8  and 42.2 million  people worldwide, and an estimated 38.0 million people are living with HIV.

Thanks to recent improved access to antiretroviral treatment in many regions of the world, the death rate from AIDS epidemic has decreased since its peak in 2005 (690,000 in 2019, compared to 1.9 million in 2005)

Today, HIV is a manageable chronic condition. Thanks to antiretroviral therapy, people with HIV can live long and healthy lives. However, HIV is still a major global health problem. There are an estimated 38 million people living with HIV worldwide, and 2.1 million people were newly infected with the virus in 2020.

South Africa has the biggest HIV epidemic in the world, with 7.7 million people living with HIV. HIV prevalence is high among the general population at 20.4%. Swaziland has the highest prevalence of AIDS/HIV in the world (27.3%) with Botswana in second place.

Washington, D.C., has the US's highest rate of AIDS infection, at 3%. This rate is comparable to what is seen in west Africa, and is considered a severe epidemic.

If a pregnant woman has HIV, with today’s medicine, the risk of the baby being born with HIV is less then 1%.

Scientists have been able to track the history of the AIDS virus. Through research they believe 'patient zero' lived Cameroon in Africa, and contracted the disease around 1908, after hunting a chimp and being infected with SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus)

An estimated 10% of Europeans are immune to HIV infection because they have an ancestor who survived the Black Death.