Sample suggests the ancestor of this strain may date to the 1940s or ’50s, and was introduced to humans a decade or so earlier. The oldest suspected case of AIDS in the United States dates back to 1969, when an African-American teenager from Saint Louis died of AIDS-like symptoms. Tissue samples, frozen at the time of the young man’s death, contained HIV or a closely related virus and indicated that the disease was present in the United States before 1970. The virus has also been found in tissue samples from a Norwegian sailor, his wife, and their daughter, all of whom died about 1976 of AIDS-like indications.
Since 1981, when the disease was first identified in the United States, more than 600,000 cases of AIDS have been reported, and as many as 900,000 Americans may be infected with HIV. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that at the end of 2007, 33.2 million people were living with HIV/AIDS worldwide. The WHO also estimated that 16.3 million adults and children have died since the beginning of the epidemic. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest global prevalence of HIV/AIDS infection, with Asia the lowest. In the United States, the epidemic is growing most rapidly among minority populations and is a leading killer of African-American males. According to the CDC, the prevalence of the disease is six times higher in African Americans and three times higher among Hispanics than among whites.
See also BIRTH CONTROL; GAY AND LESBIAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT.
Further reading: Douglas Feldman and Julia Miller, eds., The AIDS Crisis: A Docwmentary History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998); Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988); Gerald J. Stine, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome: Biological, Medical, Social and Legal Issues (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1993);--, AIDS Update 2007: An Annual
Overview of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2007).
—Michele Rutledge
World History
