Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports cases of a rare lung infection in five young, previously healthy, gay men in Los Angeles — the first official reporting of what would become known as the AIDS epidemic.
Two of the men have already died. By the time the report was published, two of the young men were already dead. While this was the first official reporting of the disease, the history of the AIDS epidemic actually reaches back to the early 20th Century, when Simian Immunodeficiency Virus made the jump from chimpanzees to humans in Central Africa.
More than 60 years later, when HIV tests became available, blood samples from a Congolese man who died in tested positive for HIV and this was the first confirmed HIV-related death. But the existence and spread of HIV had gone unreported in the medical community until around , when a handful of doctors serving urban populations in the U.
Gottlieb encountered his first patient with unusual infections in November , when one of his medical school residents reported a young patient suffering from a severe yeast infection in his throat. When the patient began having breathing difficulties, Dr. He was astounded by the test results.
The patient tested positive for Pneumocystis carinii p neumonia PCP , a rare lung infection, in addition to oral candidiasis, also known as thrush. Gottlieb then reached out to a colleague who specialized in the new science of T-cells, the white blood cells important to the immune system.
