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A Brief History of HIV

In July 1981, the New York Times reported an outbreak of a rare form of cancer among homosexual men in New York and California, first referred to as the ""gay cancer"" but medically known as Kaposi’s Sarcoma. About the same time, Emergency Rooms in New York City began to see a rash of seemingly healthy young men come down with fevers, flu like symptoms, and a pneumonia called Pneumocystis. About a year later, the Centers for Disease Control linked the illness to blood and coined the term AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). In that first year over 1600 cases were diagnosed with close to 700 deaths.

As the number of deaths soared, medical experts scrambled to find a cause and more importantly a cure. In 1984,Institut Pasteur of France discovered what they called the HIV virus, but it wasn't until a year later that a US scientist, Dr. Robert Gallo confirmed that HIV was the cause of AIDS.

Following this discovery, the first test for HIV was approved in 1985. Over the next several years medications to combat the virus were developed as well as medicines to prevent infections that flourish when the immune systems is damaged by HIV and AIDS. By the end of 1987, there were 71,000 confirmed cases of AIDS, resulting in over 40,000 deaths.

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