The First Publications Of HIV
In June of 1981, the Centers for Disease Control in the United States reported for the first time that a number of homosexual men were suffering from a couple of rare diseases. They were suffering from a rare form of skin cancer while four other homosexual men were suffering from a rare form of lung infection.
What made these cases fascinating was the fact that these sicknesses usually only affected people with extremely low immune systems. A month later, the New York Times published an article about a study that described 41 identical cases of a certain skin cancer. It was the first time that something was written about HIV.
The Search For HIV
Health workers were noticing that mainly homosexual men were getting affected in the Western part of the world. In Africa, it was men and women that were falling victim to illness. They also noticed that injecting drug users, people who had blood transfusions and babies of infected mothers were getting affected.
These patterns suggested that the disease was being spread through sexual activity and through the blood. The search for the virus was underway and soon HIV was discovered.
In 1984 it became possible to detect the virus in the human body with a test. By 1993, the disease that came to be known as AIDS had become a big epidemic. In 1994, the World Health Organization had almost 1.000.000 people from 192 different countries on record that were living with AIDS.
The Aids Pandemic
UNAIDS and the WHO estimate that AIDS has killed more than 25 million people since it was first recognized in 1981, making it one of the most destructive pandemics in recorded history.
In 2005 alone, an estimated 2.8 million lives were lost to the AIDS pandemic with more than half a million of those being children. In 2007, between 30.6 and 36.1 million people were believed to live with HIV and an estimated 2.1 million people (including 330,000 children) were lost.
On the image below you can see the percentage of adults per country with HIV at the end of 2005. Click here to see a full view of the image.
*Image courtesy of Grcampbell