Epidemics and pandemics (2): AIDS

Just over 40 years ago, in June 1981, a paper appeared in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) describing an opportunistic lung infection in otherwise healthy gay men.   The lung condition was pneumocystis pneumonia, and this was the first description of what came to be known as AIDS.   That first description, first article, was a case series, of five people, and therefore not evidence from particularly high up the traditional evidence pyramid.  I may have pointed this out to students when discussing evidence based practice and that pyramid.

There is more about this in this post from Circulating Now at the National Library of Medicine, with a link to a 1996 reprint of the article, reprinted as part of commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the CDC.

The 1981 article has been cited by 218 other things, according to its PubMed record, including some articles to commemorate the 40th anniversary of its publication. Like this one, which cites the first descriptions of the causative agent, published in 1983 and 1984.

The earliest article in PubMed that uses the name AIDS seems to be from MMWR in 1982, where the title has it as acquired immune deficiency syndrome and the abstract acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.    The abbreviation is used too.   Anything earlier that uses the abbreviation seems to be about hearing aids, teaching aids, and so on.   The earliest one not in MMWR was in the New England Journal of Medicine, and by the following year there was a journal called AIDS Research.  

I started in medical libraries in 1986, and AIDS was a current, hot, topic.   My memory is that it was thought to be (or perhaps more accurately portrayed as) something that affected gay men only, but as the NLM article above makes clear, in 1982 there were reports of cases in babies and adults that had received blood transfusions.   I had also noticed cases in Edinburgh among users of intravenous drugs - I graduated from there in the same year I started in medical libraries.  

The NLM has a virtual tour of its historical collections about HIV and AIDS.     

The Guardian has a piece that tells the stories of people who remember the early days of this particular outbreak,