The Beginning of AIDS in the US

Can you imagine a world without AIDS? Or a world before AIDS? That is something that is difficult for our generation to understand because we grew up knowing about AIDS. A new film is out called A Normal Heart with the story of the AIDS epidemic in the US that helps us understand the fear and discrimination that the homosexual community felt when the disease was new to the world.

On June 5, 1981, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that described five young, that were previously healthy, gay men in Los Angeles that had a rare lung infection. Within days doctors from across the US reported more cases, By the end of the year there were 270 reports cases of severe immune deficiency among gay men, and 121 of those individuals died.

 On September 24, 1982, the  CDC uses the term "AIDS" (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) for the first time and the first definition of AIDS: " a disease at least moderately predictive of a defect in cell-mediated immunity, occurring in a person with no known case for diminished resistance to that disease.”