My first introduction to AIDS came through the news reports of a boy named Ryan White who had contracted the disease through a blood treatment for his hemophilia. I was only 10 or 11 at the time this story was making headlines, but I distinctly remember wondering why so many people were scared of him and why they didn’t want to allow him back to school. His mom ate, played and lived with him every day and she wasn’t scared of being close to him. What was wrong with everybody, I wondered? At that time, AIDS was such a new disease and few people knew much about how it was spread from person to person. Fear of this new unknown disease caused the masses to panic. What many people do not know is that in the early 1980s, which many attribute to be the start of AIDS, this epidemic had already been around for forty years in other parts of the world where it originally began.
Many believe that AIDS first appeared in the 1940s in Africa. The first known case of an AIDS-related death occurred in 1959 when a man from the Congo died from an unspecified illness. His blood was drawn and stored to be tested at a later date; it was eventually confirmed to be infected with AIDS. Most scientists feel that AIDS is derived from a virus found in monkeys (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus or SIV), a result from a crossover of microbes from the monkey species to the human species. The Centers for Disease Control was the first to publish a report (in June 1981) on AIDS (although it was not called AIDS until 1982) in their Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” where they devoted a few paragraphs to an unprecedented strain of pneumonia that was claiming the lives of gay men. In the years prior to 1981, 31 deaths were attributed to AIDS. In 1982, that number grew almost tenfold to 234 deaths. By 1982, the Centers for Disease Control had pinpointed that this new disease was being transmitted through contact with an infected person’s blood.
By 1982, fourteen countries were reporting AIDS cases in their regions. AIDS was no longer just the gay plague” as some people first wanted to believe. Many cases began emerging of people contracting AIDS through blood transfusions and newborns contracting AIDS from their infected mothers. By 1985, a blood test had been created to definitively identify if someone was a carrier of HIV/AIDS. It is also in this year that President Reagan finally mentions AIDS for the first time; five years later, he apologizes for waiting so long to bring AIDS to the forefront.
In 1988, the United States pushes for legislation to ban discrimination against those federal workers infected with the AIDS virus. In 1990 alone, over 18,000 die from AIDS-related causes. By the 1990s, several famous actors, musicians and sports players have come forward to announce they have AIDS and many of them have passed on, including Robert Reed, Liberace, Freddie Mercury, Rock Hudson and Arthur Ashe. By 2006, over 25 million people have succumbed to AIDS and almost 40 million people are infected with HIV.
While much is being done to help spread the word about AIDS/HIV and how using condoms consistently and properly can help in slowing down the epidemic, it is still an uphill battle; this struggle is especially difficult in developing countries where there is lack of government funding, lack of proper education and lack of institutional and political support in the promotion of condoms and safe sex.
For more information visit: AIDS: A Deadly History