33 years ago today

In the June 5 1981 issue of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a rare form of pneumonia in five gay men

Michael Gottlieb, MD, a physician and immunologist,  was the lead author of this first public account identifying AIDS, and the date is now regarded as the beginning of the epidemic. 

In his words, Gottlieb said:

In January 1981, I was asked to see a patient for an immunology consultation in my Los Angeles practice. He was a 31-year-old gay man with a fever and weight loss. He also turned out to have Pneumocystis pneumonia. He had almost no CD4 cells. I’d never seen anything like his case before.
Word trickled out into the medical community that I was seeing this patient. Colleagues referred three more patients who were essentially carbon copies. Now we had four men and were convinced that this was something that would become more common.
We contacted the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, who advised talking to the CDC. The individual assigned from the CDC to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health was unaware of anything unusual in the local gay male population. He checked with the CDC, and they were not aware of anything nationally.
At that point they invited us to write the MMWR report, which was titled “Pneumocystis Pneumonia—Los Angeles.” Doctors all over the country started telling me about additional cases and asking for advice about how to manage them..

AIDS enters the lexicon in 1982...

In 1983, Pasteur Institute researchers Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi isolate a virus from the swollen lymph gland of an AIDS patient. They called it lymphadenopathy-associated virus or LAV. (In 2008, the Nobel Prize in Medicine recognizes this huge achievement)

In 1985, the first HIV test licensed; blood banks begin screening donations.

By 1986, everybody agrees to call the virus HIV: human immunodeficiency virus.

As time passed, treatments developed so that the killer disease had real care options, but make no mistake-  HIV/AIDS is the epidemic of my lifetime... the plague that still infects and kills.

Learn more about the history of HIV/AIDS. Learn how to protect yourself... 


Timeline info