World Aids Day 2012

Over the course of my lifetime, HIV and AIDS have emerged as a destructive force across the globe. But what do we know now about where the virus came from and it's earliest victims? Long before the 1981 MMWR from the CDC, HIV was moving, infecting and killing.

Did you know:

Researchers believe that sometime in the 1930s simian immunodeficiency virus, SIV, crossed over to humans in central Africa. The mutated virus became the first human immunodeficiency virus, HIV-1.

In 1959, what may be the first known case of HIV in a human occurred in a person who died in the Congo. His preserved blood samples were later confirmed to be HIV+.

In New York City, on June 28, 1959, Ardouin Antonio, a 49-year-old Jamaican-American shipping clerk dies of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a disease closely associated with AIDS. Dr. Gordon Hennigar, who performed the autopsy found PCP and believes Ardouin probably had AIDS.

It is believed that in the 1960s HIV-2, the variant found in Western Africa, was transferred to people from sooty mangabey monkeys in Guinea-Bissau.

Robert Rayford of St Louis, Missouri is believed now to be the first documented victim of HIV/AIDS in North America. He reported having experienced symptoms since 1966 and died at age 16 in May 1969. He had Kaposi’s sarcoma according to his autopsy, and 18 years aftr he died, his samples tested positive for HIV.

A female baby was born in New Jersey in 1973 or 1974 to a sixteen-year-old girl, an identified IV drug user with multiple sexual partners. At five, the child died. Subsequent testing on her stored tissue samples confirmed HIV-1 infection.
On December 12, 1977, Danish physician and surgeon Grethe Rask died of PCP. It is believed she became HIV + during the time she worked in Zaire (Congo) and she showed symptoms as early as 1974. Her friend and colleague, Ib Bygbjerg (a physician specializing in communicable diseases), wrote in a 1983 letter to The Lancet that "while working as a surgeon under primitive conditions, she must have been heavily exposed to blood and excretions of African patients."

Also in 1977, a San Francisco prostitute gives birth to the first of her three children. Each of her children died and tested positive for HIV, indicating the mother was already infected at the time of her first child’s birth. She died of AIDS in May 1987.              
Source:  Wikipedia

It is a battle still being fought around the world. I am remembering all the lost this day.