Aids
AidsFor an epidemic that would explode to claim hundreds of thousands of lives, AIDS surfaced very quietly in the United States, with a small notice on June 4, 1981 in a weekly newsletter published by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, alerting doctors to five unusual cases of pneumonia that had been diagnosed in Los Angeles residents over the previous few months.
All the patients were homosexual men who had come down with PCP (Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia), a lung infection usually seen only severely malnourished children or adults undergoing intensive chemotherapy. But until they got sick the California men were well nourished, vigorous adults, whose immune systems should have protected them from the infection.
Within the year, similar cases were reported from all over the country: apparently healthy adults who were suddenly getting sick with rare infections and malignancies that healthy people should not get. Most were from New York City, California, Florida and Texas, and not all were homosexual men. Men and women who used intravenous drugs were also getting sick, as were men with hemophilia, the male and female sexual partners of people in these risk groups, immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, and some of the infant children born to women at risk.
All these varied people had one thing in common: almost absent levels of the white blood cells called T helper cells that keep the immune system functioning properly. Their defective immune systems left them vulnerable to one serious health problem after another. Although many problems could be treated, and even cured, others immediately arose. After their first serious problem, people were said to have AIDS, and once diagnosed with AIDS most survived for only a year or two.
By 1984, the virus called H.I.V. was firmly established as the cause of the mysterious syndrome. H.I.V. can pass from one person to another through sexual contact or contact with infected blood, settle into their T helper cells, and progressively destroy them.
A blood test to detect carriers of H.I.V. was released in the spring of 1985. For the first time people could be tested to see if they were at risk for developing AIDS, and scientists could get some idea of the form the epidemic, if unchecked, might grow to take in the USA and around the world.
The news was not good. The epidemic was shaped like an iceberg, with a small visible tip and a huge invisible base. For every person who was sick with AIDS, thousands of others were infected with H.I.V. but were still entirely well, and often not even aware that they were infected and able to transmit the virus to others.
At the end of 1988, for instance, almost 90,000 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS, and almost 50,000 had died of the illness, but public health officials were estimating that close to a million might carry the virus. By the peak of the epidemic in 1995, 476,000 Americans had...
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