AIDS DAY: The history

For The Herald Bulletin

November 29, 2008 11:05 pm

— History of AIDS
1959: Subsequent analysis of a blood sample of a Bantu man who died of an unidentified illness in the Belgian Congo makes him the first confirmed case of an HIV infection.
1981: The first cases of AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) are identified among gay men in the United States, acquiring the designation, GRID (gay-related immune deficiency).
1982: Cases of AIDS begin to be reported by 14 nations. U.S. Center for Disease Controls receives its first report of “AIDS in a person with hemophilia (from a blood transfusion) and in infants born to mothers with AIDS.”
1983: 33 countries report cases of AIDS.
1985: Actor Rock Hudson dies of AIDS on Oct. 2 shortly after making public his AIDS on July 25 thus becoming the first major public figure to make such an announcement.
1986: On March 31, President Ronald Reagan makes his first mention of AIDS publicly at the Third International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C. By this time, there are some 60,000 cases of full-blown AIDS and 30,000 deaths.
1987: On March 20, AZT (also known as Retrovir, zidovudine, or ZDV) — manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline — becomes the first anti-HIV drug (a nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor) to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
1990: Ryan White, a 18-year-old, white, heterosexual, middle-class teenager from Kokomo, dies on April 8 of AIDS, which he contracted from blood products as part of his treatment for hemophilia.
1999: Scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham discovers the origin of human immunodeficiency virus Type 1 (HIV-1), the virus that causes AIDS in humans. Pan troglodytes troglodytes, a subspecies of chimpanzee in West-Central Africa, is the origin of HIV-1.
2000: With AIDS killing worldwide more people than any other infectious disease, 40 million people are living with the disease, and nearly all those will die within the next 20 years. Ninety-five percent of all new infections occur in developing countries. Prevention has slowed the spread, but not arrested it. According to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, “Only an AIDS vaccine can end the HIV/AIDS pandemic.”
Source: fohn.net/history