HIV/AIDS Pandemic: A Look Back in Time
In modern times, one could easily argue that the HIV/AIDS pandemic was the single most destructive widespread illness to sweep the globe. In summary, the death toll from HIV/AIDS has reached a total of 36 million people. At this time there are around 31-35 million individuals who have been diagnosed with HIV: the bulk of these people reside in Sub-Saharan Africa, a place where around 5% of the total number of people are infected (mphonline.org). While an HIV diagnosis is not the death sentence that it was decades ago, there is still a need for more research and developments in preventing and treating the condition. Looking backwards to the past can be tremendously beneficial in understanding the journey the disease has taken, starting with the first outbreak.
The disease was very pinpointed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1976. The outbreak as it manifested in the United States was more mysterious. The first whisper of the disease was reported by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in their weekly Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report detailed cases of an uncommon lung infection: “In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the patients died. All 5 patients had laboratory-confirmed previous or current cytomegalovirus...
Case reports of these patients follow” (cdc.gov, 1981). The scientific community now views this as the first report of AIDS that the world had ever seen. By the end of 198, there was a total number of 270 cases of this same mysterious immune deficiency, primarily seen in gay men. Also by the end of the year, slightly less than half of those men had died (hiv.gov).
The following year demonstrates how organizations around the nation began to mobilize around the AIDS crisis. A clinic was set up in San Francisco; another one was developed in New York. This year was notable because it represented the first time that the U.S. government devoted time and attention to addressing the disease: on April 13, 1982, the first congressional hearing on HIV/AIDS happened where the CDC aired their estimate that there were perhaps tens of thousands of infected people probably living in the United States, unaware of the fact that they were infected. Thus, “In September, Congressional representatives Henry Waxman and Phillip Burton introduce legislation to allocate $5 million to CDC for surveillance and $10 million to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for AIDS research” (hiv.gov). This move signaled to the rest of the world just how serious the outbreak was: with so many people infected and unaware of it, the disease could spread rapidly with people completely…
