1981: The Beginning

1981: The Beginning

In 1981, the first cases of AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) were identified among gay men in the United States, acquiring the designation, GRID (Gay-Related

By the end of 2003, twelve million children in Sub-Saharan Africa were orphaned by AIDS. Source: AVERT.ORG Image Source: CDC/Dr. Lyle Conrad

Immune Deficiency); however, scientists later found evidence that the disease existed in the world for some years prior, i.e., subsequent analysis of a blood sample of a Bantu man, who died of an unidentified illness in the Belgian Congo in 1959, made him the first confirmed case of an HIV infection. Source: CNN In an article, "1959 and all that: Immunodeficiency viruses," by Simon Wain-Hobson of the Pasteur Institute in Nature (Volume 391, 5 February 1998, pp. 532-533), Wain-Hobson wrote: "Where did HIV [Human Immunodeficiency Virus] come from? Both of the AIDS viruses, HIV-1 and HIV-2, originated in Africa... As is often the case with microbes, a jump from one species to another is probably to blame... chimpanzees (for HIV-1) and sooty mangabeys (for HIV-2)... When did the AIDS epidemic begin?... the Big Bang seems to have occurred around, or just after, the Second World War. Emerging microbial infections often result from adaption to changing ecological niches and habitats." Cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP, a lung infection) and Kaposi's sarcoma (a rare skin cancer) were reported by doctors in New York and Los Angeles in 1981, then the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began tracking a growing population of young men, women, and babies, whose immune systems were nearly destroyed. Late in 1982, the condition began to be referred to as AIDS. Source: American Red Cross For a few at first, their awareness of AIDS began with the publishing of a little noticed entry on page two of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of June 5, 1981, where a strange outbreak of killer pneumonia was spreading among gay men. Since this report, AIDS has graduated from a seemingly local phenomenon to a global epidemic