Saturday marks 40 years since the first five cases of what became known as AIDS were officially reported.
In the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on June 5, 1981, the five patients are described as previously healthy gay men who were relatively young, between the ages of 29 and 36 years old. Their sicknesses and deaths marked the tumultuous beginning of the recognition of AIDS.
“In the period October 1980–May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the patients died. All 5 patients had laboratory-confirmed previous or current cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection and candidal mucosal infection,” the initial CDC report reads.
Ronald Reagan was president in the early years of AIDS, and the ongoing association of AIDS and being gay resulted in a slow response from his administration. Reagan aides continuously made anti-gay jokes while acknowledging that about one-third of reported cases were fatal, according to reports.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who in 1984 assumed his current role as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recalled to “TODAY,” “I can remember very distinctly sitting in my office outside my lab in the clinical center hospital where I saw the first (report) describing the first five patients from Los Angeles with this curious new disease, with nobody knowing what was going on.”
In the beginning, securing resources for the fight against AIDS was difficult. Major funding didn’t start until George H.W. Bush’s presidency.
“We were trying to convince people that this was not something that was going to go away, this was something that was gonna get worse and worse,” Fauci said.
Since then, there have been several major milestones in preventing the spread of HIV.
According to HIV.gov, the first White House Conference on HIV/AIDS was hosted in 1995 under President Bill Clinton. And in 1996, the number of new AIDS cases diagnosed in the U.S. declined for the first time since the beginning of the epidemic.
“We were trying to convince people that this was not something that was going to go away, this was something that was gonna get worse and worse."
In 1997, highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) became the new treatment standard, and in 2012, drugs such as PrEP were introduced.
But in 2021, there is still an absence of an HIV vaccine.
Fauci told “TODAY” that one isn’t available “was not for lack of trying” but mainly because the body doesn’t naturally produce an immune response to the virus.
“We have highly effective vaccines against COVID-19 because we know the body can do it, and we induce the body to do it,” Fauci said. “With HIV, that’s not the case. We’ve got to do better than what natural infection does.”
HIV.gov reports that AIDS has claimed more than 700,000 lives in the U.S. since 1981.
Today, more than 1.1 million people in America are living with the disease.
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