History of HIV/AIDS

In the early months of 1981, five youngmen were admitted to various hospitals of Los Angeles, suffering from an unusual type of pneumonia caused by a commonly occurring protozoa known as Pneumocystics carinii (P. carinii). Previously Pneumonia caused by P carinii had only been seen in patients who were immunocompromised, such as infants born with a primary immune deficiency (e.g. Severe Combined Immune Deficiency-SCID) or in adults whose immune system became deficient due to other causes i.e. secondary immune deficiency status.

The physician in charge of the first cases was puzzled. These five patients were all youngmen who had evidence of a widespread immunodeficiency without any appearant reason. They had evidence of other infections and coincidentally they were all homosexuals. The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia was notified and supplies of Pentamidine were requested although by this time two of the five patients have died. CDC published an account of these five cases in its weekly bulletin the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) on 05 June 1981 & noted that the occurrence of Pneumonia causes by P carinii in five previously healthy individuals, who had no known reason for their defective immune status was unusual and questioned whether their homosexual contact could be associated with the development of the defects in the immune system which led to Pneumocystosis.

At about the same time as physicians in Los Angeles had reported the clustor of cases of Pneumocystosis, physicians in New York City and California notified the CDC of occurrence of a severe form of Kaposi's Sarcoma in twenty six young men (Kaposi's Sarcoma is a vascular neoplasm, uncommon in US and Eastern Europe, seen mainly in elderly men). Of the twenty six patients reported in CDC in July 1981, all had an evidence of an immunodeficiency not related to any known cause and several had other serious infections (four having Pnemocystosis). All were homosexuals. Similar reports were from Los Angeles and San Fransisco.

This was an epidemic in which death would be caused by one or more unusual opportunistic infections or by cancer present only because the immune system had broken down due to unknown reasons.

Extremely alarmed, the CDC instituted a nationwide surveillance programme in July 1981 and finally the new disease was termed the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS and it was characterized as the occurrence of unusual infections or cancers in previously healthy individuals due to an immunodeficiency of unknown cause. It is a chronic multisystem disease which causes physical, social and psychological morbidity.

From the very beginning of the epidemic, AIDS exhibited all the classic signs of an infectious disease and the only convincing explanation for its cause was the emergence of a new infectious agent. Various researchers independently discovered the causative agent of AIDS at approximately the same time (1983-84) and named the virus LAV the Lymphadenopathy Associated Virus.

In May 1986 a sub-committee of the International Committee on the Taxonomy of viruses proposed that the AIDS retroviruses by officially designated as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus or HIV. Now HIV and AIDS so almost inseparably as HIV/AIDS.