The History of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome

The history of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and its underlying cause, infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), is not one story, but many. Every victim of AIDS has different health problems, personal struggles, and losses. In the early 1980s, when the first AIDS cases attracted the attention of doctors and scientists, no treatment was known. Victims who wrote about their lives described growing more and more seriously ill, watching sick friends die, and waiting to die themselves. As research moved ahead and the cause of HIV/AIDS was finally understood, medicines were developed that delayed disability, prolonged life, and decreased the spread of HIV. A positive diagnosis no longer meant death within two years but a slower journey through the disease. However, this journey often came with increasing ill health and disability and devastating medical and drug expenses. Decades after the first AIDS cases baffled the medical community, no cure or preventive vaccine has been developed.

With its cause and method of spreading now understood, HIV/AIDS is a preventable disease. Yet it remains a major health threat in many parts of the world. In addition to disrupting the lives of its millions of victims, AIDS has upset the lives of whole families, communities, and entire countries. The epidemic brought confusion to politics and governments and quickly became both a national and a worldwide problem.

Although the history of AIDS is filled with illness, pain, loss, and death, it is also filled with caring, determination, and hard work. Many dedicated health researchers have spent decades working to understand the cause of AIDS, develop treatments for its victims, and find ways to prevent and cure the disease. Though AID...

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...s around the globe continue to search for a cure for AIDS, others are making startling discoveries about its origin.

Since it was first recognized in 1981, AIDS has killed millions of people. “It is the worst and deadliest disease that humankind has ever experienced,” according to Mark Stirling, UNAIDS director of East and Southern Africa. What’s worse, there is no cure for or vaccine against AIDS. In September 2009, researchers announced the results of the first successful large clinical trial of an HIV vaccine called RV144. The vaccine is a combination of two older vaccines and was found to be 31 percent effective in lowering the rate of HIV infection. Although the study was considered a “moderate” success, most health professionals agreed that it represented an important advance in HIV research. In recent years, antiretroviral therapy has shown major reductions