AIDS: our research illness
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus
History
About a century ago in Cameroon, around 1920, a hunter dropped a chimpanzee with an arrow. While tearing away his prey, the hunter was accidentally cut, so that the blood of the chimpanzee came into direct contact with his. And at this time, an unknown virus "spread". In other words, it went from one species to another. That's how the story of AIDS begins. The story of the "hunter's cut" is only a theory, but it is considered one of the most plausible scenarios of how a virus immune deficiency jumped from chimpanzees to humans and became HIV-positive.
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What probably happened later is that the hunter went to a nearby town, and there he infected someone through sexual contact. The virus would have reached Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Belgian colonial authorities were conducting treatment campaigns with reusable syringes. This would have helped the virus spread more quickly.
In 1960, the Belgians abandoned the Congo, and the Haitians who formed the bulk of the medical community returned to Haiti. At least one of them brought HIV with them. There, an American management clinic was paying for blood plasma donations. Clinical reusable needles helped spread the disease through Port-au-Prince, and, around 1969, some of these infected blood plasmas went to the US for future use in hospitals or clinics. Once there, it spread among drug users through shared needles and between homosexual men through sexual contact.
In 1981, cases of a rare lung infection called Pneumocystis carinii penumonia (PCP) were found in five, previously health, young homosexual men in Los Angeles. At the same time, there were reports of a group of men in New York and California with an aggressive and unusual cancer called Kaposi's Sarcoma.
In September of 1982, the CDC (Centers for Disease Controls) used the term "AIDS" (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) for the first time, and describes it as "a disease at least moderately predictive of a defect in cell mediated immunity, occurring in a person with no known case for diminished resistance to that disease "
The Pasteur Institute of France reported the discovery of a new virus associated with lymphadenopathy- (or LAV) and the National Cancer Institute announced that it had found the HTLV-III retrovirus. In a joint conference with the Institute they announced that LAV and HTLV-III are identical and the probable cause of AIDS.
In May 1986, the International Committee on Virus Taxonomy said that the virus that causes AIDS officially will be called HIV (human immunodeficiency virus).
Histologia del PCP amb tinció d'hematoxilina-eosina