History of AIDS

From AIDS Wiki

In 1981 a young immunologist Michael Gottlieb found five homosexual patients in three LA hospitals with PCP. Tests in three patients showed low CD4 counts. All patients used inhalant drugs. Cases of KS in New York were connected to emerging cases in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and soon "gay cancer" became "GRID." A bias against gay sex encouraged seeing a sexually transmissible agent as the cause of the new syndrome.

What constitutes AIDS varies widely across time and geography. The definition was changed many times by the CDC settling in 1993 to one which includes 29 diseases and conditions including a low CD4 count. Until ELISA tests were available in Africa, the Banqui defintion allowed for diagnosis based on a set of symptoms without an HIV test.

The mainstream imagination today seems to conflate HIV and AIDS as specific diseases, yet AIDS itself has never been more that a surveillance category. AIDS is not a new disease, it is most broadly an HIV+ test result plus one of 29 possibilities. If you have TB and an HIV+ test you have AIDS, if you have TB and an HIV- test, you have TB.