BY GEORGE CURRY
Sunday will mark the 30th anniversary of the first public identification of AIDS. On June 5, 1981, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) disclosed that five previously healthy gay men in Los Angeles were diagnosed with an infectious disease normally associated with a deteriorated immune system.
Writing about the initial discovery, last week in the Washington Post, Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at the National Institutes of Health, recalled: “One month later, the MMWR wrote about 26 cases in previously healthy gay men from Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, who had developed PCP [pneumocystis carinii pneumonia] as well as an unusual form of cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma.
“Their immune systems were severely compromised. This mysterious syndrome was acting like an infectious disease that was probably sexually transmitted. My colleagues and I never had seen anything like it. The idea that we could be dealing with a brand-new infectious microbe seemed like something for science fiction movies.
“Little did we know what lay ahead.
“Soon, cases appeared in many groups: injection-drug users, hemophiliacs and other recipients of blood and blood products, heterosexual men and women, children born to infected mothers. The era of AIDS had begun.”
Actually, AIDS began prior to 1981 — we just didn’t know it.
Since 1981, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1.7 million people in the United States have been infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Among the 1.7 million, 600,000 died. More than 1.1 million are living with the disease today. Every 9 and a half minutes, someone is infected with HIV in the United States.
AIDS, initially thought to be the exclusive purview of White gay men, has taken such a large toll on African Americans that Phill Wilson, of the Black AIDS Institute, describes it as a Black disease. Although Blacks represent only 12 percent of the U.S. population, African-Americans account for 45 percent of all HIV infections and 46 percent of all people living with HIV in 2006, according to the CDC.
Over the course of the epidemic, African Americans have become a larger proportion of those diagnosed with AIDS, jumping from 25 percent in 1985 to almost double — 48 percent — in 2009.
Among certain groups, the numbers are staggering:
* Black women account for 61 percent of all new HIV infections among women, a rate nearly 15 times larger than that of White women. Most African-American women were infected through heterosexual activity.
*Black teenagers represent only 17 percent of all U.S. teenagers, but 68 percent of all new AIDS diagnoses among teens.
*According to one five-city sampling, 46 percent of Black gay and bisexual men were infected with HIV,
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