Welcome to the HIV Resource
On this page, you will learn about the history behind HIV, the progression of the disease in society, the advent of new therapies and the virus' biological mechanism
What is HIV?
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An infamous acronym for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, HIV is most known as the sexually transmissible infection that results in the Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome AIDS.
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While our understanding of the virus has greatly grown since its discovery, and HIV-positive patients can lead an ordinary life with modern treatments, a great deal of stigma still surrounds the illness.
The year was 1981; 5 cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) were diagnosed in some gay men living in L.A. At the same time, others died of an unusual disease; they presented with purple spots on the skin, lymph nodes swelling before they passed. It was similar to cancer—but the symptoms matched a type usually only seen in the aged. The people affected , however, were young and otherwise healthy. As cases rapidly increased, the association between this new disease and homosexuality grew stronger, with the media going as far as to labelling it as ‘GRID’ – Gay Related Immune Deficiency, or even “Gay cancer”. The first traceable article, entitled “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” was penned by Lawrence K. Altman and appeared in the New York Times. The medical and scientific community were perplexed. The general public was (and would remain) terrified. Of the 337 patients that were diagnosed in the US, 130 had died by the year’s end.
DISCOVER
This is a digitized version of July 3rd 1981’s issue from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996...Note how, at the time, it was a footnote! How quickly things would change.
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The full article is available here.
Though scientific understanding was gaining greater footing, the population still had a tremendous gap in their knowledge, with many believing that HIV-positive people should be forced to quarantine and that the virus could be spread through saliva. Suspicion of infection was enough to lead to total ostracization. In 1982, the CDC debuted the use of the term “AIDS”-Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome- providing a definition for the disease and estimating that tens of thousands had already been infected by that point. Target groups remained the same; drug addicts, homosexual men and haemophiliacs. The agent at the origin of HIV was only found by Dr. Robert Gallo and his colleagues in 1984, though Dr. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi had discovered that AIDS was linked to a specific retrovirus ( a virus inserting its own genetic material in its host).