Timeline of AIDS

This is a timeline of AIDS, including some discussion of early AIDS cases (especially those before 1980).

1930s

 * Researchers believe that sometime in the 1930s a form of simian immunodeficiency virus jumped to humans in central Africa. The mutated virus becomes HIV-1.

1958

 * A 25-year-old printer from England named David Carr, who had served in the Royal Navy between 1955 and 1957, contracts a series of mysterious ailments including Pneumocystis carinii. He dies early the next year (1959). In 1990, tests by a hospital in Manchester reveal HIV in Carr's tissue samples, and he is briefly recognized as the first known AIDS death. Subsequent, more sophisticated testing at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at New York University Medical School reveals the HIV to have been a laboratory contaminant. The source reference for this item has been removed from the CDC's website.

1959

 * The first known case of HIV in a human occurs in a person who died in the Congo, seemingly later confirmed as having HIV infection from his preserved blood samples (Zhu et al., 1998). However, according to the authors of the 1959 discovery, they never found, nor alleged to have found, HIV, or anything like a full virus. According to these authors, even “attempts to amplify HIV-1 fragments of >300 base pairs (bp) were unsuccessful, . . . However, after numerous attempts, four shorter sequences were obtained” that only represented small portions of two of the six genes of the complete AIDS virus.  Citation:  Zhu T, Korber BT, Nahmias AJ, Hooper E, Sharp PM and Ho DD. An African HIV-1 sequence from 1959 and implications for the origin of the epidemic. Nature 1998;391(Feb. 5):594-597.
 * In New York City, a 49-year-old Haitian-born shipping clerk dies of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a disease closely associated with AIDS victims. Dr. Gordon Hennigar, who performed the postmortem examination of the man's body, has been quoted in numerous publications saying that he believes the man probably had AIDS.

1960s

 * HIV-2, a viral variant found in West Africa, is thought to have transferred to people from sooty mangabey monkeys in Guinea-Bissau during this period.

1968

 * A 2003 analysis of HIV types found in the United States, compared to known mutation rates, suggests that the virus may have first arrived in the United States in this year.

1969

 * A St. Louis teenager, identified only as Robert R., 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 the virus that causes AIDS.

1975

 * The first reports of wasting and other symptoms, later determined to be AIDS, are reported in residents of Africa.

1976

 * Norwegian sailor Arvid Noe dies; 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 herself die of AIDS in May 1987. She was clearly infected by 1977 and perhaps earlier.

1978

 * A Portuguese man known as Senhor Jose dies; he will later be confirmed as 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. He was also suffering from Cryptococcus at the time.
 * On October 31, French-Canadian flight attendant Gaetan Dugas pays his first known visit to New York City bathhouses. He would later be deemed "Patient Zero" for his apparent connection to many early cases of AIDS in the United States.
 * Rick Wellikoff, a gay Brooklyn schoolteacher, dies of AIDS in New York City on December 23. He is the 4th American to have died from the new disease.

1981

 * January 15, Nick Rock becomes the first known AIDS death in New York City.
 * May 18, Dr. Lawrence Mass becomes the first journalist in the world to write about the epidemic, in the "New York Native," a gay newspaper. A gay tipster overheard his physician mention that some gay men were being treated in intensive-care units in New York City for a strange pneumonia.  "Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded" was the headline on Mass's article.  Mass repeated a New York City public-health official's claims that there was no wave of disease sweeping through the gay community.  At this point, however, the CDC had been gathering information for about a month on the outbreak that Mass's source was dismissing.
 * June 5, CDC reports a cluster of Pneumocystis pneumonia in five gay male drug users in Los Angeles.
 * July 4, CDC reports clusters 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.

1982

 * June 18, CDC MMWR 1982 31(23);305-7
 * "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 reports a cluster of opportunistic infections and Kaposi's sarcoma among Haitians recently entering the United States.
 * July 27, The term AIDS (for acquired immune deficiency syndrome) is proposed at a meeting in Washington of gay-community leaders, federal bureaucrats and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). TIME
 * 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 OOI. [...] 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.

1983

 * In January, Dr. Francoise Barre, 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.
 * CDC National AIDS Hotline established.
 * March, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issues donor screening guidelines. AIDS high-risk groups should not donate blood/plasma products.
 * Australia has first death from AIDS in Melbourne, the Hawke Labor government invests a significant campaign that gave Australia one of the lowest infection rates in the World.

1984

 * April 23, U.S. 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: the retrovirus subsequently named human immunodeficiency virus or HIV in 1986. She also declares that a vaccine will be available within two years.
 * September 6, first performance at Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco of The AIDS Show which runs for two years and is the subject of a 1986 documentary film of the same name.

1985

 * March 2, FDA approves first AIDS antibody screening tests for use on all donated blood and plasma intended for transfusion.
 * October 2, Rock Hudson, the first American celebrity to publicly admit having AIDS, dies of the disease.
 * October, a conference of public health officials including representatives of the Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organisation meet in Bangui and define AIDS in Africa as "prolonged fevers for a month or more, weight loss of over 10% and prolonged diarrhoea".

1986

 * HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) is adopted as name of the retrovirus that was first proposed as the cause of AIDS by Luc Montagnier of France, who named it LAV (lymphadenopathy associated virus) and Robert Gallo of the United States, who named it HTLV-III (human T-lymphotropic virus type III)
 * January 14, "By 1996, three to five million Americans will be HIV positive and one million will be dead of AIDS" - NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, New York Times
 * Model Gia Marie Carangi dies of AIDS related illness on November 18th.

1987

 * "By 1990 one in five heterosexuals will be dead of AIDS" - Oprah Winfrey. (Source Required)
 * AZT (zidovudine), the first antiretroviral drug, becomes available to treat HIV sufferers.

1992

 * In the US, AIDS becomes the leading cause of death for 24 to 44 year old men
 * The first combination drug therapies for HIV are introduced. Such "cocktails" are more effective than AZT alone and slow down the development of drug resistance.

1993

 * CDC expands definition of AIDS to include a person with HIV infection and a CD4 cell count below 200. CDC estimates that the expanded definition could increase cases reported in 1993 by approximately 75%.

1995

 * Saquinavir, a new type of protease inhibitor drug, becomes available to treat HIV. Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy becomes possible. Within two years, death rates due to AIDS will have plummeted in the developed world.

1996

 * Robert Gallo's discovery that a natural compound 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, "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." article in the Washington Post
 * Based on the Bangui definition the 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.

1998

 * December 10, International Human Rights Day, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) is launched to campaign for greater access to HIV treatment for all South Africans, by raising public awareness and understanding about issues surrounding the availability, affordability and use of HIV treatments. TAC campaigns against the view that AIDS is a death sentence.

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.
 * F Gao, E Bailes, DL Robertson, Y Chen, CM Rodenburg, SF Michael, LB Cummins, LO Arthur, M Peeters, GM Shaw, PM Sharp and BH Hahn. Origin of HIV-1 in the chimpanzee Pan troglodytes troglodytes. Nature 397, 436-41 (1999).
 * RA Weis and RW Wrangham. From Pan to pandemic. Nature 397, 385-6 (1999).


 * Edward Hooper releases a book called The River, which accuses doctors who tested a polio vaccine in 1950s Africa of unintentionally starting the AIDS epidemic. The theory receives a great deal of publicity.

2000

 * 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 donors.

2004

 * January 5, "Individual risk of acquiring HIV and experiencing rapid disease progression is not uniform within populations", says Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of NIAID.

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.

2006

 * November 9th 2006, HIV found in Gorillas, HIV-1 and HIV-2