Dates In AIDS History

AIDS is a disease the likes of which the world hasn’t seen in many years. It is reaching pandemic levels of infection across the world and

it can be very deadly. In this article, we’ll go over a little bit of the brief history behind how AIDS has come to affect the world.

- In the year of 1958, the disease known as AIDS struck its first victim. A man by the name of David Carr began to become very ill, expressing mysterious symptoms such as pneumocystis carinii. The following year, he died. The disease was still unknown at that point, and tissue samples from Carr showed to be HIV positive when tested in 1990.

- 1959 also showed the first active HIV infection. A man in the Congo proved to be positive for two of six of the genes that make up the AIDS disease. His blood was preserved and later tested.

Consequently, the first case of AIDS in America occurred in 1959. A Haitian man in New York City died of pneumocystis carinii, a common problem for those with AIDS. Dr. Gordon Hennigar examined the man’s corpse and believed AIDS was responsible for the death.

- 1969 was the next time that AIDS would show itself in America. A teenager in St. Louis was found to have died of an illness that left his doctors clueless. In 1987, tests confirmed that the boy had indeed died of AIDS.

- In 1975, symptoms of AIDS began to appear throughout Africa. In the following few years, the disease would begin to find its way around the world. In 1976, a Norwegian sailor died of AIDS that he likely contracted in Africa in the 1960’s. In 1977 a man from Denmark and a woman from San Francisco were found to be infected with the disease, with both cases coming from the African continent. The woman in San Francisco had given birth to three children who also carried the disease.

Did You Know? 

- HIV-2 was first diagnosed in 1978, occurring in a Portuguese man who claimed he probably got infected in Guinea-Bissau.

- In 1980, a man named Gaetan Dugas traveled to the bathhouses of New York and likely introduced the disease to America in a major way. He became known as “Patient Zero” due to the wide spread of the infection that he caused.

Take an active role in choosing treatment for your disease.  Depression can cause you to lose interest in your health and treatment but this is something you should fight against.  Don’t put your life and quality of life in someone else’s hands.  You should always be active in the choice of treatment choices.

Robert Gallo would be instrumental in further pushing our understanding of the disease later on, as he discovered that a compound known as chemokines can be helpful in slowing the progression of the disease in the year of 1996.
 
These are just a few of the landmark moments in our understanding of AIDS. As our knowledge continues to grow, we gain more and more hope that the disease is something that we will eventually be able to conquer.