The first publications about HIV

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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. They also noticed that injecting drug users, people who had blood transfusions and babies of infected mothers were getting infected.

This suggested that the disease was being spread through sexual activity and through the blood. The search for the virus began 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. They predicted that by the end of the century there would be between 30 and 40 million people that would be living with AIDS. These big numbers put AIDS in the category with the other major "killing" diseases.

On this image you can see the percentage of adults per country with HIV at the end of 2005. Click here to see the full view of the image*.

HIV chart










On this page you can also read what exactly HIV is, what the symptoms are and how you can become HIV-positive.

*Image courtesy of Grcampbell