HIV/AIDS

HIV and AIDs are huge diseases that are lethal having killed 35 million people with 70 million people having been infected. But HIV did not just start as the "gay disease" as Reagan thought of it as, but instead in Africa through chimpanzees. The disease that these chimpanzees had was called SIV and was most likely transferred to humans when hunters ate the infected chimpanzees or with the chimpanzee's blood mixed with their own.

This virus started to really spread in 1920 in Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo. The virus was able to multiply in Kinshasa because of a large amount of migrants and their sex trade. And from that point forward it was only a matter of time for the virus to reach most of the population in the Congo, to then spread via trade.

In America, HIV arrived in the 1970's but was not targeted or thought to be a large issue until the 1980's. One of the first reports on HIV was by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called the CDC, where 5 healthy homosexual men were getting infected with Pneumocystis pneumonia, which is caused by the normally harmless fungus. Which was interesting to the CDC because this pneumonia would only affect people with a compromised immune system.

As this information began to spread, The New York Times wrote an article about this immune disorder which affected 335 people, and was written to show that this only affects homosexual men, called a gay-related immune deficiency.

In 1984 it was realized through research that HIV was the cause of AIDS, and there have been large leaps forward with medicating these problems, but it still is an issue in our generation. I find it interesting that this disease started out as a "gay-related immune deficiency", and was not yet alerting much of the nation for the destruction that it will cause.

https://www.history.com/topics/1980s/history-of-aids