The History Of AIDS

The symptoms of AIDS were first recognized in the early 1980s:

• In 1981, a rare lung infection called Pneumosystis carinii pneumonia began to appear in homosexual men living in Los Angeles and New York.
• At the same time, cases of a rare tumor called Kaposi's sarcoma were also reported in young homosexual men. These tumors had been previously known to affect elderly men, particularly in parts of Africa. New appearances of the tumors were more aggressive in the young men and appeared on parts of the body other than the skin.
• Other infections associated with weakened immune defenses were also reported in the early 1980s.

Groups most frequently reporting these infections in the early 1980s were homosexuals, intravenous drug users, and people with hemophilia, a blood disorder that requires frequent transfusions. Blood and sexual transmission were therefore suspected as the sources for the spread of the infections.

In 1984, the responsible virus was identified and given a name. In 1986, it was renamed the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).