A Timeline Of Hiv And Aids
The HIV.gov Timeline reflects the history of the domestic HIV/AIDS epidemic from the first reported cases in 1981 to the presentwhere advances in HIV prevention, care, and treatment offer hope for a long, healthy life to people who are living with, or at risk for, HIV and AIDS.
View a timeline of the current Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative. Please visit HIVHistory.org for a timeline of the global and domestic response to the HIV epidemic.
Challenges Of Virus Tracking
One of the primary challenges experts have in tracking a virus to the initial infection is that it may present as another infection. For example, when HIV first appeared in the U.S., doctors reported rare lung infections in a group of individuals.
Because of this, doctors may never identify cases as being due to HIV. People may have had HIV before these individuals, but received a diagnosis for another condition or did not seek medical attention.
Even then, if doctors determine that someone has HIV, it is challenging to identify who had the virus first because of the speed at which it spreads.
- the host of the virus
- how many introductions to humans there have been
- how it connects to previous events
- if there is evidence for local adaptation
In some cases, an emergent virus is a variation of an existing virus, such as the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes COVID-19. This knowledge allows for the rapid development of treatments and vaccines as experts already understand the mechanics of similar viruses.
Understanding the origin of a virus makes it possible to determine how it transmits from one animal or person to another. Not only does this help scientists develop treatments, but they can also work on methods to prevent its spread.
Samples Collected From Wildlife In Thailand
While its true that most emerging diseases affecting humans come from wildlife, its often human behavior that is to blame for the spillover. Humans are tearing down forests and hunting, eating, and selling wild animals at unprecedented rates. Each exotic animal shipped across the ocean to be sold as a pet is an sveacasino opportunity for a new pathogen to take root in a new continent. Each tree ripped from its roots increases interactions between humans and wild animals, and thus the odds that viruses will find new populations to infect.
But the good news is: If were the ones causing the problem, were the ones who can stop it.
At EcoHealth Alliance, were striving toward a world where pandemics like the one caused by HIV/AIDS are a thing of the past. Join us.
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Effects Of Hiv/aids On Society
HIV/AIDS has far-reaching adverse effects on the economic, cultural, and social spheres of society. The epidemic drains the economy of the country as funds need to be diverted to treat the infected patients. It is also a great economic burden on individual families with HIV/AIDS as a significant portion of the income needs to be spent on treatment procedures. High prevalence of HIV/AIDS cripples the entire society and reduced the nation’s productivity.
Where And When Did Hiv Start
Studies of some of the earliest known samples of HIV provide clues about when it first appeared in humans and how it evolved. The first verified case of HIV is from a blood sample taken in 1959 from a man who was living in what is now Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Scientists used this sample to create a ‘family-tree’ of HIV transmission. By doing this, they were able to trace the first transmission of SIV to HIV in humans, which they concluded took place around 1920, also in Kinshasa. This area is known for having the most genetic diversity in HIV strains in the world, reflecting the number of different times SIV was passed to humans. Many of the first cases of AIDS were recorded there too.
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Who Benefits From Preexposure Prophylaxis
People who may benefit from preexposure prophylaxis include anyone who:
- is in a relationship with an HIV-positive person who has a detectable viral load
- has sex with men and women
- regularly has sexual partners of unknown HIV status, especially if they inject drugs
- has contracted a sexually transmitted infection in the past 6 months
- has injected drugs, been in drug treatment, or shared needles in the past 6 months
The Global Distribution Of Deaths From Hiv/aids
In some countries HIV/AIDS is the cause of more than a quarter of all deaths
Globally, 1.5% of deaths were caused by HIV/AIDS in 2019.
This share is high, but masks the wide variations in the toll of HIV/AIDS across the world. In some countries, this share was much higher.In the interactive map we see the share of deaths which resulted from HIV/AIDS across the world. Across most regions the share was low: across Europe, for example, it accounted for less than 0.1% of deaths.
But across some countries focused primarily in Southern Sub-Saharan Africa the share is very high. More than 1-in-4 of deaths in South Africa were caused by HIV/AIDS in 2019. The share was also very high across Botswana Mozambique Namibia Zambia Kenya and Congo .
Death rates are high across Sub-Saharan Africa
The large health burden of HIV/AIDS across Sub-Saharan Africa is also reflected in death rates. Death rates measure the number of deaths from HIV/AIDS per 100,000 individuals in a country or region.
In the interactive map we see the distribution of death rates across the world. Most countries have a rate of less than 10 deaths per 100,000 often much lower, below 5 per 100,000. Across Europe the death rate is less than one per 100,000.
Across Sub-Saharan Africa the rates are much higher. Most countries in the South of the region had rates greater than 100 per 100,000. In South Africa and Mozambique, it was over 200 per 100,000.
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On The 40th Anniversary Of The First Reported Cases Of Aids
Content From: Antony J. Blinken Secretary of Stateâ¢â¢
Topics
Cross-posted from the U.S. Department of State Press Office
Forty years ago, on June 5th, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on the first five cases of what later became known as AIDS. At that time, none of us could have imagined that AIDS would still be with us today or that it would have taken more than 32 million lives globally, including 700,000 in the United States.
Today, we honor the memory of these men, women, and children, many of whom we lost in the prime of their lives to this devastating disease. We also celebrate the more than 38 million people worldwide, including 1.2 million in the United States, who are bravely living with HIV.
The United States is proud of our longstanding partnership with countries and communities around the world toward ending the global AIDS epidemic. We continue to bring the very best of America to this effort â from groundbreaking scientific discovery and inspired activism to steadfast political leadership and deep diplomatic engagement.
With bipartisan support across presidential administrations and from the U.S. Congress for nearly two decades, the United States has invested more than $85 billion in the global AIDS response through the Presidentâs Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and as the leading donor to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. This is the largest commitment ever by one country to address a single disease.
A Brief History Of The Epidemic In America
HIV was first identified in 1981 and is the cause of one of the most deadly and persistent epidemics in human history.
The identification of the virus began with rare lung infections and rare and unusually aggressive cancers in young gay men in New York and California. By December 1981, doctors found these same symptoms in five infants whose mothers were drug users and sex workers.
In 1992, AIDS became the number one cause of death for men in the U.S. aged 2544. By 1995, there were 500,000 reported cases of AIDS in the country. However, in 1996 the number of new AIDS cases declined for the first time since the epidemic began.
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Impact On Young People
- Teens and young adults continue to be at risk, with those under 35 accounting for 57% of new HIV diagnoses in 2019 .51 Most young people are infected sexually.52
- Among young people, gay and bisexual men and minorities have been particularly affected.53
- Perinatal HIV transmission, from an HIV-infected mother to her baby, has declined significantly in the U.S., largely due to increased testing efforts among pregnant women and ART which can prevent mother-to-child transmission.54,55,56
- A recent survey of young adults found that HIV remains a concern for young people, especially for young people of color.57
Canadian Flight Attendant Theory
A Canadian airline steward named Gaëtan Dugas was referred to as “Case 057” and later “Patient O” with the alphabet letter “O” standing for “outside Southern California”, in an early AIDS study by Dr. William Darrow of the Centers for Disease Control. Because of this, many people had considered Dugas to be responsible for taking HIV to North America. However, HIV reached New York City around 1971 while Dugas did not start work at Air Canada until 1974. In Randy Shilts‘ 1987 book And the Band Played On , Dugas is referred to as AIDS’s Patient Zero instead of “Patient O”, but neither the book nor the movie states that he had been the first to bring the virus to North America. He was incorrectly called “Patient Zero” because at least 40 of the 248 people known to be infected by HIV in 1983 had had sex with him, or with a person who had sexual intercourse with Dugas.
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Homeless People And Intravenous Drug Users In New York
A volunteer social worker called Betty Williams, a Quaker who worked with the homeless in New York from the seventies and early eighties onwards, has talked about people at that time whose death would be labelled as “junkie flu” or “the dwindles”. In an interview for the Act Up Oral History Project in 2008, she said: “Of course, the horror stories came, mainly concerning women who were injection-drug users … who had PCP pneumonia , and were told that they just had bronchitis.” She continues: “I actually believe that AIDS kind of existed among this group of people first, because if you look back, there was something called junkie pneumonia, there was something called the dwindles that addicts got, and I think this was another early AIDS population way too helpless to ever do anything for themselves on their own behalf.”
Julia Epstein writes in her book Altered Conditions: Disease, Medicine and Storytelling that: “As we uncover more of the early history of HIV infection, it becomes clear that by at least the 1970s the virus was already making major inroads into the immune systems of a number of diverse populations in the United States and had for some time been causing devastation in several countries in Africa.”
Where Does Hiv Come From
HIV is thought to have occurred after people ate chimps that were carrying theSimian Immunodeficiency Virus .
HIV is a type of lentivirus, which means it attacks the immune system. SIV attacks the immune systems of monkeys and apes in a very similar way. This suggests HIV and SIV are closely related, and that SIV in monkeys and apes crossed over to humans to become HIV.
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Origin And Epidemic Emergence
Several of the theories of HIV origin accept the established knowledge of the HIV/SIV phylogenetic relationships, and also accept that bushmeat practice was the most likely cause of the initial transfer to humans. All of them propose that the simultaneous epidemic emergences of four HIV groups in the late 19th-early 20th century, and the lack of previous known emergences, are explained by new factor that appeared in the relevant African regions in that timeframe. These new factor would have acted either to increase human exposures to SIV, to help it to adapt to the human organism by mutation , or to cause an initial burst of transmissions crossing an epidemiological threshold, and therefore increasing the probability of continued spread.
Genetic studies of the virus suggested in 2008 that the most recent common ancestor of the HIV-1 M group dates back to the Belgian Congo city of Léopoldville , circa 1910. Proponents of this dating link the HIV epidemic with the emergence of colonialism and growth of large colonial African cities, leading to social changes, including a higher degree of non-monogamous sexual activity, the spread of prostitution, and the concomitant high frequency of genital ulcer diseases in nascent colonial cities.
Social changes and urbanization
Colonialism in Africa
This theory was later dubbed “Heart of Darkness” by Jim Moore, alluding to the book of the same title written by Joseph Conrad, the main focus of which is colonial abuses in equatorial Africa.
Where We Are Now: 2000
Since 2000, additional factors have begun contribute to the the global spread of HIV. Heroin addiction in Asia has been on the rise, which brought with it dirty needles and the risk of new infections. India suffered with over 2 million diagnoses alone, in spite of the government’s refusal to admit the epidemic had adversely affected the nation.
The WHO released its comprehensive report examining HIV and AIDS in all of its 25-year history in 2010. This report had good news for developed nations: by 2008, the U.S. domestic HIV infection rate was considered effectively stable, and has remained so to this day. The report also demonstrated that while insistent public awareness campaigns about safe sex and other methods of transmission had slowed the rate of HIV infection in developed countries, there was much to be done elsewhere.
Global Education and Aid Efforts
Under President Bush, the U.S. committed funds to help African countries, but the funds were mismanaged and the spread of HIV continued unabated. Of the 4.1 million cases in sub-Saharan Africa then, only 1% received the available drugs. This led to the WHO’s declaration of the failure to treat the 6 million AIDS patients living in developing nations as a global public health emergency.
HIV Denialism Disrupts Aid
By the time Mbeki was recalled from the presidency in 2008 and one year before the FDA approved its 100th HIV/AIDs drug, an estimated 16.9% of South Africans aged 15-49 were HIV positive.
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Origin Of Hiv And Aids
The origin of theHuman Immunodeficiency Virus has been a subject of scientific research and debate since the virus was identified in the 1980s. There is now a wealth of evidence on how, when and where HIV first began to cause illness in humans.
Find out more in our interactive timeline of the HIV epidemic.
Is There Only One Type Of Hiv
No, there are actually two types of HIV: HIV-1 and HIV-2, and they have slightly different origins.
HIV-1 is closely related to the strain of SIV found in chimps. While HIV-2 is closely related to the strain of SIV found in sooty mangabeys monkeys. The crossover of HIV-2 to humans is believed to have happened in a similar way as HIV-1 .
HIV-2 is far more rare, and less infectious than HIV-1, so it infects far fewer people. It is mainly found in a few West African countries, such as Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.
To complicate things further, HIV is also classified by four main groups of viral strain , each of which has different genetic make-up. HIV-1 Group M is the strain that has caused the majority of HIV infections in the world today, meaning it is the dominant strain.
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Therapies Came In The Late ’80s And ’90s
The tide started to turn in the late ’80s and ’90s, as more effective therapies became available and transformed what it meant for an individual to live with HIV.
On March 19, 1987, the Food and Drug Administration approved an antiretroviral drug known as AZT to treat HIV infection.
Another important change also happened that year.
After pressure from activists fighting for their community’s survival, the FDA issued new regulations around clinical drug trials — making it possible for patients to access experimental, potentially life-saving therapies without having to wait years for official agency approval.
One of those activists was Ryan White, an Indiana teenager who contracted AIDS in 1984 through contaminated needles while being treated for hemophilia. He experienced discrimination in his community after his diagnosis, even being denied entry to his middle school. As White spoke publicly about his experiences and his family challenged his treatment in court, he became one of the early public faces of the disease.
Princess Diana was also instrumental in shattering stigmas and myths around the illness, famously photographed visiting HIV/AIDS patients in hospital wards and shaking hands with them without gloves.
And in 1991, NBA star Earvin “Magic” Johnson revealed he had been diagnosed with HIV — his identity as a straight, Black man helped demonstrate that anyone could contract the disease.
Years Of Aids: A Timeline Of The Epidemic
Over the past four decades, UCSF has led the way in its heroic and committed response to the AIDS epidemic, both locally and globally. This timeline covers some of the highlights over the past 40 years at UCSF, in the nation and around the world after a mysterious outbreak affecting gay men was first reported on June 5, 1981.
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