By BOB KECSKEMETY
Photo: The AIDS Memorial Quilt of the Names Project Foundation is displayed on the National Mall, 1987
December 1 of every year is known as World AIDS Day and is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic and the spread of the HIV infection. Various memorials are held each year, both locally and internationally, to honor persons who have died from HIV/AIDS. Health officials also use this day to educate the public on the virus along with prevention and treatments. The Red Ribbon is the global symbol for solidarity with HIV-positive people and those living with AIDS.
In 1987, James W. Bunn and Thomas Netter, two public information officers for the Global Program on AIDS at the World Health Organization (now UNAIDS) in Geneva, Switzerland, first came up with the idea of World AIDS Day. Dr. Jonathan Mann, Director of the Global Program on AIDS agreed with the recommendation and that World AIDS Day should be December 1 of each year — a date chosen because it was considered in the media as a “dead news” time of year between US elections, Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays.
The first World AIDS Day was held in 1988.
The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) became operational in 1996 and it took over the planning and promotion of World AIDS Day. Rather than focus on a single day, UNAIDS created the World AIDS Campaign in 1997 to focus on year-round communications, prevention and education.
According to the CDC, deaths related to HIV/AIDS rose sharply in the United States since its formal discovery in the mid-eighties to around 50,000 a year in the mid-nineties. Death rates then dropped dramatically in the late 90s to around 20,000 a year and have held at that level ever since.
AIDS TIMELINE
1930s
• Researchers found that sometime
in the 1930s a form of Simian Immuno-deficiency Virus (also known as African Green Monkey Virus or Monkey AIDS) which could infect up to 33 species, jumped to humans in central Africa. The mutated virus becomes HIV-1. HIV-1 is the most common and pathogenic strain of the virus. Scientists divide HIV-1 into a Group M (major) and several minor groups.
1959
• The first known case of HIV in a human occurs in a person who died in the Congo, later confirmed as having HIV infection from his preserved blood samples.
• A 49-year old shipping clerk in New York City dies of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a disease closely associated with AIDS.
1960
• HIV-2, a viral variation found in West Africa, is thought to have transferred to people from Sooty Mangabey monkeys in Guinea-Bissau.
1964
• Researchers at Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute and Wayne State University School of Medicine synthesized AZT under a US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant. AZT was originally intended as an anticancer drug.
1966
• HIV first arrived in the Americas infecting
a person in Haiti. At
this time, many Haitians were working in the Congo.
1968
• It is believed that the HIV virus first arrived in the United States according to a 2003 analysis of HIV types compared to known mutation rates. The disease remained unrecognized for the next 12 years.
1969
• A St. Louis teenager dies of an illness that baffles his doctors. Eighteen years later, molecular biologists at Tulane University in New Orleans test samples of his remains and find evidence of HIV present.
1975
• The first reports of wasting and other symptoms, later determined to be AIDS, are reported in Africa.
1976
• A Norwegian sailor, Noe, dies and it is later determined that he contracted HIV/AIDS in Africa during the early 1960s.
1977
• Danish physician Grethe Rask dies of AIDS contracted in Africa.
• A San Francisco prostitute gives birth to the first of three children who would later be diagnosed with AIDS and whose blood, when tested after their deaths, would reveal HIV infection. The mother would die of AIDS in May 1987. It is believed she was infected in 1977 or earlier.
1978
• A Portuguese man dies. He will later be confirmed as having the first known infection of HIV-2. He was believed to have been exposed to the disease in Guinea-Bissau in 1966.
1980
• April 24, San Francisco resident Ken Horne, the first AIDS case in the United States to be recognized at the time, is reported to Center for Disease Control with Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KS). He was also suffering from Cryptococcus at the time.
• October 31, French-Canadian flight attendant Gaetan Dugas is believed to have visited a New York City bathhouse. He would later be labeled as “Patient Zero” for his apparent connection to many early cases of AIDS in the US.
1981
• January 15, Nick Rock becomes the first known AIDS death in New York City.
• May 18, the first article on AIDS is written by Dr. Lawrence Mass in the New York Native, a gay newspaper. Mass received a tip from a gay man who overheard a physician mention that some gay men were being treated in New York City for a strange pneumonia. “Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded” was the headline on Mass’ article. Mass repeated a New York City public-health official’s claims that there was no wave of disease sweeping through the gay community. However, at this point, the Centers for Disease Control had been gathering information for about a month on the outbreak that Mass’ source was dismissing.
• July 4, CDC reports cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis pneumonia among gay men in California and New York City.
• By the end of the year, 121 people are known to have died from the disease.
• First known case in the United Kingdom.
1982
• June 18, The CDC reported: “Exposure to some substance (rather than an infectious agent) may eventually lead to immunodeficiency among a subset of the homosexual male population that shares a particular style of life. For example, Marmor et al. recently reported that exposure to amyl nitrite was associated with an increased risk of KS in New York City. Exposure to inhalant sexual stimulants, central-nervous-system stimulants, and a variety of other ‘street’ drugs was common among males belonging to the cluster of cases of KS and PCP in Los Angeles and Orange counties.”
• July 9, CDC reported a cluster of opportunistic infections (OI) and Kaposi’s sarcoma among Haitians recently entering the United States.
• Summer, first known case in Italy.
• September 24, Current Trends Update on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) – United States: “CDC defines a case of AIDS as a disease, at least moderately predictive of a defect in cell-mediated immunity, occurring in a person with no known cause for diminished resistance to that disease. Such diseases include KS, PCP, and serious OI… Diagnoses are considered to fit the case definition only if based on sufficiently reliable methods (generally histology or culture). Some patients who are considered AIDS cases on the basis of diseases only moderately predictive of cellular immunodeficiency may not actually be immunodeficient and may not be part of the current epidemic.”
• December 10, a baby in California becomes ill in the first known case of AIDS from a blood transfusion.
• First known cases in Brazil and Canada.
1983
• January, Dr. Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, isolates a retrovirus that kills T-cells from the lymph system of a gay AIDS patient. In the following months, she would find it in additional gay and hemophiliac sufferers. This retrovirus would be called by several names, including LAV and HTLV-III before being named HIV in 1986.
• March, United States Public Heath Service issues donor screening guidelines. AIDS high-risk groups should not donate blood/plasma products.
• Australia has first death from AIDS in Melbourne, the government invests in a campaign that ultimately gives Australia on of the lowest HIV/AIDS infection rates in the world.
• AIDS is diagnosed in Mexico for the first time.
1984
• March 30, Gaetan Dugas dies. He was a French Canadian flight attendant linked by the CDC directly or indirectly with 40 of the first 248 reported cases of AIDS in the US
• April 23, US Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler announces at a press conference that an American scientist, Dr. Robert Gallo, has discovered the probable cause of AIDS is a retrovirus subsequently named Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). She also declares that a vaccine will be available within two years.
• December 17, Ryan White is diagnosed with AIDS by a doctor performing a partial lung removal. White became infected with HIV from a blood product as part of his treatment for hemophilia which was given to him on a regular basis. When the public school that he attended learned of his disease in 1985, there was enormous pressure from parents and faculty to bar him from school premises.
1985
• March 2, FDA approves first AIDS antibody screening tests for use on donated blood and plasma intended for transfusion.
• October 2, Rock Hudson dies of AIDS. He is the first American celebrity to publicly admit having AIDS. He was diagnosed with it in June 1984.
• October 12, Ricky Wilson, guitarist rock band The B-52s, dies from an AIDS-related illness.
• October, a conference of public health officials including representatives of the CDC and World Health Organization (WHO) meet in Bangui and define AIDS in Africa as “prolonged fevers for a month or more, weight loss of over 10% and prolonged diarrhea.”
• First officially reported cases in China.
1986
• January 14, the New York Times reports that “…one million Americans have already been infected with the virus and that this number will jump to at least 2 million or 3 million within 5 to 10 years…”
• February, President Reagan instructs his Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to prepare a report on AIDS. Without allowing Reagan’s domestic policy advisers to review the report, Koop released the report at a press conference on October 22, 1986.
• First officially known cases reported in the Soviet Union and India.
1987
• AZT, the first antiretroviral drug, becomes available to treat HIV.
• Williamson, West Virginia closes its public swimming pool following an incident involving the local resident with HIV/AIDS. “The Oprah Winfrey Show” broadcasts a town hall meeting during which local residents express their fears about AIDS and homosexuality.
• The book “And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic” published chronicling the 1980-1985 discovery and spread of HIV/AIDS, government indifference and political infighting in the United States to what was initially perceived as a gay disease.
1988
• May, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop sends an eight-page, condensed version of his Surgeon General’s Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome report named Understanding AIDS to all 107,000,000 households in the United States, becoming the first federal authority to provide explicit advice to Americans on how to protect themselves from AIDS.
• December 1, the first World AIDS Day.
• Two popular Argentinean rock singers die of AIDS complications in Buenos Aires.
1989
• The television movie “The Ryan White Story” aired. It starred Judith Light as Jeanne, Lukas Haas as Ryan and Nikki Cox as sister, Andrea. Ryan White had a small cameo appearance as Chad, a young patient with AIDS. Another AIDS-themed film, The Littlest Victims, debuted about James Oleske, the first US physician to discover AIDS in newborns during AIDS’ early years when many thought it was only homosexually-spread.
1990
• February 16, New York City artist/social activist Keith Haring dies from AIDS-related illness.
• April 8, Ryan White dies at the age of 18 from pneumonia caused by AIDS complications.
• Congress enacted The Ryan White Care Act, the United States’ largest federally-funded health related program (excluding Medicaid and Medicare).
1991
• November 24, a little over 24 hours after issuing the statement confirming that he had tested HIV positive and had AIDS, Freddie Mercury, singer of the British band Queen, dies at the age of 45. The official cause of death was bronchial pneumonia resulting from AIDS.
• NBA star Magic Johnson publicly announces that he is HIV-positive.
1992
• The first combination drug therapies for HIV are introduced. These “cocktails” become more effective than AZT alone and slow down the development of drug resistance.
• American actor Anthony Perkins, known for his role as Norman Bates in the Psycho movies, dies from AIDS.
• April 6, popular science fiction writer Isaac Asimov dies. Ten years later his wife revealed that his death was due to AIDS-related complications. The writer was infected during a blood transfusion in 1983.
1993
• Tennis star Arthur Ashe dies from AIDS-related complications.
1995
• Saquinavir, a new type of protease inhibitor drug, becomes available to treat HIV. Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) becomes possible. Within two years, death rates due to AIDS will plummet in the developed world.
• March 26, Rapper Eazy-E dies from AIDS-related pneumonia.
• Oakland, California resident, Jeff Getty becomes the first person to receive a bone marrow transplant from a Baboon as an experimental procedure to treat his HIV infection. The graft did not take, but Getty experienced some reduction in symptomology before dying of heart failure after cancer treatment in 2006.
1996
• Robert Gallo discovers that some natural compounds known as chemokines can block HIV and halt the progression of AIDS is hailed by Science Magazine as one of that year’s most important scientific breakthroughs.
1997
• September 2, Washington Post: “The most recent estimate of the number of Americans infected with HIV, 750,000, is only half the total that government officials used to cite over a decade ago, at a time when experts believed that as many as 1.5 million people carried the virus.”
• WHO’s cumulative number of reported AIDS cases from 1980 through 1997 for all of Africa is 620,000. For comparison, the cumulative total of AIDS cases in the USA through 1997 is 641,087.
1999
• January 31, studies suggest that a retrovirus, SIVcpz (simian immunodeficiency virus) from the common chimpanzee Pan troglodytes, may have passed to human populations in west equatorial Africa during the twentieth century and developed into various types of HIV.
2000
• The WHO estimates between 15% and 20% of new HIV infections worldwide are the result of blood transfusions where the donors were not screened or inadequately screened for HIV.
2001
• September 21, FDA licenses the first nucleic acid test (NAT) systems intended for screening of blood and plasma donations.
2005
• January 21, CDC recommends anti-retroviral post-exposure prophylaxis for people exposed to HIV from rapes, accidents or occasional unsafe sex or drug use. This treatment should start no more than 72 hours after a person has been exposed to the virus, and the drugs should be used by patients for 28 days. This emergency drug treatment has been recommended since 1996 for health-care workers accidentally stuck with a needle, splashed in the eye with blood, or exposed in some other way on the job.
• A highly resistant strain of HIV linked to rapid progression to AIDS is identified in New York City.
2007
• The first case of someone being cured of HIV. A San Francisco man, Timothy Ray Brown, co-infected with leukemia and HIV, is cured from HIV due to his bone marrow transplant in Germany. Other similar cases begin being studied to confirm what is believed to be similar results.
2011
• Confirmation of the first patient cured of HIV, Timothy Ray Brown, as having a negative HIV status, 4 years after treatment.
