AIDS at 25: 25 years later:June 5,1981-June 5,2006

On June 5, 1981, Dr. Michael Gottlieb, a young immunologist at the UCLA School of Medicine, reported five cases of a rare pneumonia among gay men in Los Angeles. Each had a profoundly depressed immune system. Two were already dead.

His report in the weekly bulletin of the Centers for Disease Control was the first medical description of what would come to be known as acquired immune deficiency syndrome. It signaled the start of a global scourge that has since killed 25 million. Today, a quarter-century later, it is estimated that 38.6 million people are living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Gottlieb had no idea that he had discovered a monster. "I thought this might be bigger than Legionnaire's disease," he recalled, referring to the discovery five years earlier of a previously unknown bacterium that killed 29 attendees at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia.
Soon after Gottlieb's paper appeared, similar accounts of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia were trickling in from gay neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco. Those new reports also described outbreaks among gay men of Kaposi's sarcoma, a rare skin cancer that caused disfiguring purple lesions.

Amid the initial excitement of medical researchers on the trail of a new disease, no one knew that 250,000 gay men in the United States were already infected with HIV.

Twenty-five years later, the world is still playing catch-up. One million Americans are living with HIV, but 25 percent of them do not know it. Worldwide, 9 out of 10 people carrying the virus have yet to be tested, according to estimates from UNAIDS, the United Nations program on HIV/AIDS.

Since it first appeared in five young homosexual men living in Los Angeles who contracted an unusual form of pneumonia because of their ravaged immune systems, half a million people have died in the United States and 25 million people have died worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Last year alone, AIDS claimed the lives of 2.8 to 3.6 million people, over half a million of whom were children.

We as a whole need to educate ourselves and educate everyone else around us to take an HIV test if they have never done so and to also always have safe sex.