![]() Gottlieb contacted an editor at the New England Journal of Medicine, the most prestigious medical journal in the U.S., and was told that the submission-review-publication process would take at least four months. Gottlieb couldn’t determine how their sexual identity was relevant.Ī fourth PCP patient appeared in April 1981, and then a report of a fifth man who already died (an autopsy found PCP). Thorough examinations of the patients about their lifestyles yielded the information that were gay, but Dr. Gottlieb would come across another young man suffering with PCP and depleted T-cells, and shortly after that, a third patient was referred to him. The colleague tested the patient’s blood and found that the sample had no T-helper cells, a result so astounding that he ran the test again, with the same results. Gottlieb then reached out to a colleague who specialized in the new science of T-cells, the white blood cells important to the immune system. The patient tested positive for Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a rare lung infection, in addition to oral candidiasis, also known as thrush. Gottlieb arranged to receive a scraping of the patient’s lung tissue through a non-surgical procedure. When the patient began having breathing difficulties, Dr. Gottlieb encountered his first patient with unusual infections in November 1980, when one of his medical school residents reported a young patient suffering from a severe yeast infection in his throat. Gottlieb arranged for his findings to be disclosed to the medical community in the CDC’s weekly alert, MMWR.ĭr. One of these doctors was Michael Gottlieb, a young immunologist at UCLA (University of California Los Angeles) who diagnosed a rare lung infection in five young men between 1980-1981. started to see unusual symptoms in their patients. More than 60 years later, when HIV tests became available, blood samples from a Congolese man who died in 1959 tested positive for HIV and this was the first confirmed HIV-related death.īut the existence and spread of HIV had gone unreported in the medical community until around 1980, when a handful of doctors serving urban populations in the U.S. The new virus began infecting residents in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo some time between 19. While this was the first official reporting of the disease, the history of the AIDS epidemic actually reaches back to the early 20th Century, when Simian Immunodeficiency Virus made the jump from chimpanzees to humans in Central Africa. ![]() By the time the report was published, two of the young men were already dead. The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report described the men as having additional infections, indicating that their immune systems were compromised.
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