The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/AIDS epidemic has already devastated many individuals, families, and communities. The epidemic has left millions of children orphaned, has disrupted village and community life, and increasingly contributes to the erosion of civil order and economic growth.
The World Health Organization announces that AIDS was the fourth biggest cause of death worldwide and the number one killer in Africa. An estimated 33 million people were living with HIV, and 14 million people were recognized to have died from AIDS since the start of the epidemic.
AIDS has reshaped conventional wisdoms in public health, research practice, cultural attitudes, and social behaviors. Most notably, the AIDS epidemic has provided the foundation for a revolution that upended traditional approaches to “international health,” replacing them with innovative global approaches to disease.
On the level of the household, AIDS results in both the loss of income and increased spending on healthcare by the household. The income effects of this led to spending reduction as well as a substitution effect away from education and towards healthcare and funeral spending.
AIDS is caused by a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which originated in non-human primates in Central and West Africa. While various sub-groups of the virus acquired human infectivity at different times, the global pandemic had its origins in the emergence of one specific strain – HIV-1 subgroup M – in Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the 1920s.
The majority of HIV researchers agree that HIV evolved at some point from the closely related simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), and that SIV or HIV (post mutation) was transferred from non-human primates to humans in the recent past (as a type of zoonosis). Research in this area is conducted using molecular phylogenetics, comparing viral genomic sequences to determine relatedness.
The discovery of the main HIV/SIV phylogenetic relationships permits explaining broad HIV biogeography: the early centres of the HIV-1 groups were in Central Africa, where the primate reservoirs of the related SIVcpz and SIVgor viruses (chimpanzees and gorillas) exist; similarly, the HIV-2 groups had their centres in West Africa, where sooty mangabeys, which harbour the related SIVsmm virus, exist. However, these relationships do not explain more detailed patterns of biog…
In most non-human primate species, natural SIV infection does not cause a fatal disease (but see below). Comparison of the gene sequence of SIV with HIV should, therefore, provide information about the factors necessary to cause disease in humans. The factors that determine the virulence of HIV as compared to most SIVs are only now being elucidated. Non-human SIVs contain a nef gene that down-regulates CD3, CD4, and MHC class I expression; most non-human SIVs, therefore…
David Carr was an apprentice printer (usually mistakenly referred to as a sailor; Carr had served in the Navy between 1955 and 1957) from Manchester, England who died August 31, 1959, and was for some time mistakenly reported to have died from AIDS-defining opportunistic infections (ADOIs). Following the failure of his immune system, he succumbed to pneumonia. Doctors, baffled by what he had died from, preserved 50 of his tissue samples for inspection. In 1990, th…
In New York City, Nathan Fain, Larry Kramer, Larry Mass, Paul Popham, Paul Rapoport, and Edmund White officially established the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) in 1982.
Also in 1982, Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz published How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach. In this short work, they described ways gay men could be sexual and affectionate while dramatically reducing the risk of contracting or spreading HIV. Both authors were themselves ga…
In May 1983, a team of doctors at the Pasteur Institute in France including Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier reported that they had isolated a new retrovirus from lymphoid ganglions that they believed was the cause of AIDS. The virus was later named lymphadenopathy-associated virus (LAV) and a sample was sent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which was later passed to the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
Since June 5, 1981, many definitions have been developed for epidemiological surveillance such as the Bangui definition and the 1994 expanded World Health Organization AIDS case definition.