This is the first New York Times article reporting on what would later be known as the AIDS epidemic.<p>Edit: Here's the takeaway quote, in my opinion: "Cancer is not believed to be contagious, but conditions that might precipitate it, such as particular viruses or environmental factors, might account for an outbreak among a single group."<p>Edit2: "Dr. Curran said there was no apparent danger to nonhomosexuals from contagion.'"
In the movie Forrest Gump, there is a scene taking place in the late 70s or early 80s where Jenny is explaining to Forrest that she is ill and the doctors do not know what it is. She dies a few years later. It is never stated explicitly, but the idea is that she was suffering from AIDS, which she contacted during her years as a promiscuous drug addict groupie.<p>In my opinion it is one of the most powerful scenes in the movie, in the sense that it does an amazing job with taking the viewer back to that time period where AIDS was a mystery disease.
My vote for the key quote (from the bottom of the article):<p>"Dr. Friedman-Kien said he had tested nine of the victims and found severe defects in their immunological systems. The patients had serious malfunctions of two types of cells called T and B cell lymphocytes, which have important roles in fighting infections and cancer.<p>But Dr. Friedman-Kien emphasized that the researchers did not know whether the immunological defects were the underlying problem or had developed secondarily to the infections or drug use."
"There is no national registry of cancer victims, but the nationwide incidence of Kaposi's Sarcoma in the past had been estimated by the Centers for Disease Control to be less than six-one-hundredths of a case per 100,000 people annually, or about two cases in every three million people. However, the disease accounts for up to 9 percent of all cancers in a belt across equatorial Africa, where it commonly affects children and young adults."<p>Is that because GRID already was occurring in Africa, and people getting KS and dying of it, or was it just a common cancer in Africa for unrelated reasons?
An article like this makes you wonder how many different diseases (answer - over 200) get lumped together under the large "cancer" umbrella.<p>One wonders if we are doing ourselves a disservice maintaining a term more inline with shared symptoms instead of separating the diseases into shared causes.<p>At any rate I'm digressing, but cancer is a fascinating (while horrible) concept that exists in our reality. When you think about it, it is probably more responsible for what we are today than any other force on the planet, in evolutionary terms.<p>As for AIDS: The fact that it was a "gay disease" hampered everything about our response to it. I'd like to think that we would be much more in tune with emerging health threats these days, but somehow I doubt it. I really hope we have HIV licked in a few years though, because Africa really, really needs a vaccine before it can do anything else really.
Today is the 60th birthday of a friend who has been HIV+ since 1983. When we met, ca. 1986, I didn't expect him to live long. I am pleased beyond my ability to express that I was completely wrong. The party he and his husband are throwing on Sunday will be epic.
I'm currently reading And The Band Played On which is a detailed account of the rise of the AIDS epidemic and how it was ignored and mishandled back in the 80s. Definitely check it out if this subject interests you.
Similar to early diagnoses of Cystic Fibrosis, where the focus was on symptoms and less on the underlying cause. With CF, it's an issue of NaCl passing through cells, resulting in thick mucus which damages lungs, pancreas, etc. The first cases observed cysts and fibrotic tissues on the pancreas, hence, "Cystic Fibrosis". As there weren't digestive enzymes supplements then to augment the damaged pancreas, patients died of malnutrition. It wasn't until those treatments developed that the lung conditions developed in older patients, which is what CF is known for now. By then, however, the name Cystic Fibrosis had stuck.
I cannot find the article by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, which describes how the public health officials in San Francisco bowed to political pressure and did not do the typical contact-tracing, public announcements, etc. that would normally be done - because they feared getting in trouble if they pointed out that the carriers were almost all gays. But it makes an interesting counterpoint to the idea that there was a lack of concern about it.
I recommend the movie How To Survive a Plague, which also shows the beginnings of AIDS in New York. Must have been a frightening time.<p><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2124803" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2124803</a>
Here's a good article about that particular doctor and the discovery: <a href="http://nymag.com/health/features/49240/index4.html" rel="nofollow">http://nymag.com/health/features/49240/index4.html</a>
There's a great Radiolab episode, Patient Zero (<a href="http://www.radiolab.org/2011/nov/14/" rel="nofollow">http://www.radiolab.org/2011/nov/14/</a>), that covers the the spread of AIDS and tracing the disease back to its origin.
Contrast this from recent papers describing the breathtaking molecular capabilities we have these days with the HIV virus (using inactivated/re-engineered HIV to treat T cell lymphomas/leukemias, bone marrow transplants to treat HIV itself), and it's humbling both - how far we've come, and with HIV still a major killer on the global scene, how far we have to go....
So sad to read that article especially seeing that they were giving people chemotherapy right away. As if dying from AIDS weren't bad enough. Yet the article did dance around the core problem in talking about a group of promiscuous people, but the connection was not made. I hope medicine has learned better the signs of a viral outbreak.
There's a lot of info in the book "The Coming Plague" about the initial reaction to the disease GRID, which would later become AIDS.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases/dp/0140250913" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/The-Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases/dp...</a>