An Unknown Plague

Most researchers believe it was originally animal-to-human transmission that is responsible for HIV infections. West African chimpanzees are the likely source of the immunodeficiency virus, acquired when the beasts were hunted for meat, and hunters came into contact with their blood, as well as consuming the kill. The initial transmission may have happened long ago, but the virus gradually mutated and was passed between humans over the course of the years.

In the pre-jet age, sexual contact between people was limited globally, which helped slow the spread of the virus. It is believed that the first AIDS cases in the United States did not occur until the 1970s, although not every researcher buys that theory, believing that prior cases were not identified properly.

In the early days of AIDS, circa 1981, people were dying from a disease that no one understood, wasting away from a plague that not only made people very sick but for which there was no apparent cure.

There were thousands of medical professionals and researchers working on the problem, intellectually and emotionally challenged by having sick people who had an unknown disease that had never been seen before. The questions loomed: How did they get it? Was it contagious? How was it transmitted? Is there anything that can be done to stop it?

Fortunately, medical researchers soon had a name for what had been informally called gay cancer, so named because large numbers of the gay community were among the initially stricken. It seemed that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was the cause of the illness. Without treatment, it attacks the body’s cells, leaving sufferers at risk of contracting diseases like Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare cancer that was hardly ever seen in younger men.