History of AIDS

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• In the 1980s and early 1990s, the outbreak of HIV and AIDS swept across the United States and rest of the world, though the disease originated decades earlier.

• The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, is a virus that attacks the immune system, specifically CD4 cells (or T cells). The virus is transmitted through bodily fluids such as blood, semen, vaginal fluids, anal fluids, and breast milk.

• istorically, HIV has most often been spread through unprotected sex, the sharing of needles for drug use, and through birth.

• Over time, HIV can destroy so many CD4 cells that the body can’t fight infections and diseases, eventually leading to the most severe form of an HIV infection: acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS

• A person with AIDS is very vulnerable to cancer and to life-threatening infections, such as pneumonia.

• Scientists have traced the origin of HIV back to chimpanzees and simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), an HIV-like virus that attacks the immune system of monkeys and apes.

• In 1999, researchers identified a strain of chimpanzee SIV called SIVcpz, which was nearly identical to HIV.

• Chimps, the scientist later discovered, hunt and eat two smaller species of monkeys—red-capped mangabeys and greater spot-nosed monkeys—that carry and infect the chimps with two strains of SIV

• two strains likely combined to form SIVcpz, which can spread between chimpanzees and humans.

• SIVcpz likely jumped to humans when hunters in Africa ate infected chimps, or the chimps’ infected blood got into the cuts or wounds of hunters.

• Researchers believe the first transmission of SIV to HIV in humans that then led to the global pandemic occurred in 1920 in Kinshasa

• The virus spread may have spread from Kinshasa along infrastructure routes (roads, railways, and rivers) via migrants and the sex trade.

• n the 1960s, HIV spread from Africa to Haiti and the Caribbean when Haitian professionals in the colonial Democratic Republic of Congo returned home.

• The virus then moved from the Caribbean to New York City around 1970 and then to San Francisco later in the decade.

• Though HIV arrived in the United States around 1970, it didn’t come to the public’s attention until the early 1980s.

• In 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report about five previously healthy homosexual men becoming infected with Pneumocystis pneumonia,

• The following year, The New York Times published an alarming article about the new immune system disorder, which, by that time, had affected 335 people, killing 136 of them

• Because the disease appeared to affect mostly homosexual men, officials initially called it gay-related immune deficiency, or GRID.

• Though the CDC discovered all major routes of the disease’s transmission—as well as that female partners of AIDS-positive men could be infected—in 1983, the public considered AIDS a gay disease. It was even called the “gay plague” for many years after.

• In September of 1982, the CDC used the term AIDS to describe the disease for the first time. By the end of the year, AIDS cases were also reported in a number of European countries.