AIDS 20 Years Later...

On June 5, 1981, a one-and-a-half page paper in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) noted cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in five gay men in Los Angeles. The men also suffered from cytomegalovirus (CMV) infections and candidal infections of the mucosa,1 and they used recreational inhalant drugs. The editorial note pointed out: "Pneumocystis pneumonia in the United States is almost exclusively limited to severely immunosuppressed patients." "I was sitting in my office in Buildi

Written byMyrna Watanabe

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"I was sitting in my office in Building 10,²going through my usual work and lab data, and I got that first issue ... and I thought this was really odd," recalls Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). He recalls getting a "funny feeling" about it. "I don't like these unresolved things. Was this a bad batch of drugs? I never even imagined at that point that this was a new virus at all."

A month later, another MMWR report linked Pneumocystis infection in gay men with a rare cancer: Kaposi's sarcoma (KS).3 This cancer was diagnosed in 20 men in New York City and six in California; six of the 26 had pneumonia. Ten other cases of Pneumocystis pneumonia were diagnosed in California. With that second report, Fauci remembers thinking, "'Whoa; we have a problem; this sounds very much like an underlying ...

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