HIV/AIDS

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History

Main article: History of HIV/AIDS
Further information: Category:HIV/AIDS by country

Discovery



The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report reported in 1981 on what was later to be called "AIDS".

The first news story on the disease appeared May 18, 1981 in the gay newspaper New York Native. AIDS was first clinically reported on June 5, 1981, with five cases in the United States. The initial cases were a cluster of injecting drug users and gay men with no known cause of impaired immunity who showed symptoms of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a rare opportunistic infection that was known to occur in people with very compromised immune systems. Soon thereafter, an unexpected number of homosexual men developed a previously rare skin cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma (KS). Many more cases of PCP and KS emerged, alerting U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a CDC task force was formed to monitor the outbreak.

In the early days, the CDC did not have an official name for the disease, often referring to it by way of diseases associated with it, such as lymphadenopathy, the disease after which the discoverers of HIV originally named the virus. They also used Kaposi's sarcoma and opportunistic infections, the name by which a task force had been set up in 1981. At one point the CDC referred to it as the "4H disease", as the syndrome seemed to affect heroin users, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and Haitians. The term GRID, which stood for gay-related immune deficiency, had also been coined. However, after determining that AIDS was not isolated to the gay community, it was realized that the term GRID was misleading, and the term AIDS was introduced at a meeting in July 1982. By September 1982 the CDC started referring to the disease as AIDS.

In 1983, two separate research groups led by Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier declared that a novel retrovirus may have been infecting people with AIDS, and published their findings in the same issue of the journal Science. Gallo claimed a virus which his group had isolated from a person with AIDS was strikingly similar in shape to other human T-lymphotropic viruses (HTLVs) that his group had been the first to isolate. Gallo's group called their newly isolated virus HTLV-III. At the same time, Montagnier's group isolated a virus from a person presenting with swelling of the lymph nodes of the neck and physical weakness, two characteristic symptoms of AIDS. Contradicting the report from Gallo's group, Montagnier and his colleagues showed that core proteins of this virus were immunologically different from those of HTLV-I. Montagnier's group named their isolated virus lymphadenopathy-associated virus (LAV). As these two viruses turned out to be the same, in 1986, LAV and HTLV-III were renamed HIV.

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History of HIV/AIDS

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History of spread

Main article: Timeline of early HIV/AIDS cases

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1981–1982: From GRID to AIDS

The AIDS epidemic officially began on June 5, 1981, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report newsletter reported unusual clusters of Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) caused by a form of Pneumocystis carinii (now recognized as a distinct species, Pneumocystis jirovecii) in five homosexual men in Los Angeles. Over the next 18 months, more PCP clusters were discovered among otherwise healthy men in cities throughout the country, along with other opportunistic diseases (such as Kaposi's sarcoma and persistent, generalized lymphadenopathy), common in immunosuppressed patients.

In June 1982, a report of a group of cases amongst gay men in Southern California suggested that a sexually transmitted infectious agent might be the etiological agent. The syndrome was initially termed "GRID", or "gay-related immune deficiency"; other less common gay-specific terms included "gay compromise syndrome", "gay lymph node syndrome", "gay cancer", "gay plague", "homosexual syndrome", "community-acquired immunodeficiency" ( "CAID" ) and "acquired community immunodeficiency syndrome" ( "ACIDS" ). Health authorities soon realized, however, that nearly half of the people identified with the syndrome were not homosexual men. The same opportunistic infections were also reported among hemophiliacs, users of intravenous drugs such as heroin, and Haitian immigrants – leading some researchers to call it the "4H" disease. By August 1982, the disease was being referred to by its new CDC-coined name: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

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