It was originally called HTLV3 (human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 3) and it scared the medical community as far back as 1979. Patient X likely brought it to the US in 1976.
I cared for my first patient with it in 1979. He was a 10 year old boy with hemophilia A. The factor VIII supply was contaminated, as was much of the banked blood.
That was the first year we started wearing gloves to handle body fluids.
Some years ago, my BFF was at a pharmacists’ convention and met a woman who had practiced in South Florida since the early 1970s. Beginning in the mid to late 1970s (she wasn’t sure exactly when), her hospital started seeing people with bizarre infections, and if they didn’t die on that admission, they did on the next one, or MAYBE the next one after that. Most were of Caribbean descent, but not always. She knows now that those people probably had AIDS.
Or…
Q: Know why the insurance industry is going broke?
A: Because nobody wants a piece of the Rock anymore!
Q: Yesus, were we really that bad back then?
A: Yes. Yes, we were.
My Uncle Tim is a Respiratory Specialist but we call him Dr. Bozo
After his residency he started working in Pediatrics and soon tired of his patients dying. He was offered a new job at a hospital in San Francisco and gladly took it. He was so excited. A chance to work on Adults and with patients who might actually live.
This was 1982
The experience broke him. During the next few years we would see him at Christmas time and he had the “thousand yard stare”. He ended up teaching. He never had AIDS but was the first victim of it I ever met.
What terrible times
Capt
Patient X came to the US, New York City, to be exact, from Europe during the Bicentenial.
He went from there to Florida and then to Haiti. Haitian emigrants brought it back a year or two later, about 1979.
By then, much of the east coast to mid-west blood supply had pockets of contamination. One manufacturer of Factor VIII had several contaminated batches and tried to hide it. Some of it was exported to third world countries once the problem was discovered.
I take it his patients mostly had cystic fibrosis? Until the early 1980s, when Cipro came out and their pseudomonas infections could be controlled, this was the most common killer of children with c/f. Many AIDS patients over the years have taken it prophylactically too.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, SPIN magazine had a monthly column about AIDS, and I’ll never forget a doctor who said, “In 10 or 15 years, AIDS will mostly be a disease of drug addicts, and you won’t hear much about it.” I’m skeptical about futurist predictions (and was definitely so about this one) but he was right.
During my last few years as an active pharmacist, most of the AIDS patients we treated in the hospitals where I worked were prison inmates who were admitted for medical treatment they couldn’t get at the dispensary. This was the rural Midwest; things may be different elsewhere.
And the two people I have known outside my own practice who had AIDS were married heterosexual women. One was a high school classmate who died in the late 1990s :(; the other was a co-worker. The high school classmate got it from a bisexual boyfriend; her husband married her knowing she was HIV-positive and took wonderful care of her for as long as he had her. The co-worker got it from a boyfriend who was hemophiliac, and at the time I worked with her was in relatively good health. Last I heard, more than 15 years later, she is still doing well and has given birth to two healthy children - something that was beyond our comprehension at that time. By all accounts, they were conceived “the regular way” but she had a c-section a week or two before the due date, so there was less risk of mixing their blood during labor, and NO breastfeeding.
I am not entirely sure, he doesn’t like to talk about the kids or his time in SF. He got into medicine to help people and his patients dying like flies made him a little dark. Dr. Bozo is pretty happy now as he is teaching and doing research on Asthma and the like.
Is the Patient X that is being referred to Gaetan Dugas?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ga%C3%ABtan_Dugas
There is also the very odd case of Robert Rayford who died of AIDS in 1969 which means AIDS was floating about North America well before the explosion of the early eighties.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rayford
Capt
Were you following “Spin” magazine’s coverage at the time? They were really on their game about AIDS back then.
I was living in San Francisco in the late 1970’s. I remember my friend Charlie’s partner came down with a flu he couldn’t seem to shake so he finally went the hospital. He was dead in a week. My friend told me that by the time of Alphonso’s death, the only thing he could recognize about his lover was his hair. It was a terrifying horrible time. I visited Charlie in the famous AIDS ward at SF General quite a few times, when he was recovering from pneumocystis. He made a pact with his flaming transvestite friend Jerome that whoever died last had to do something interesting with the ashes of the first. They were both painters. Jerome made small disks out of Charlie’s ashes and some kind of hardener, and painted his portrait on them. Hundreds of portraits. I have a couple.
There was a time before AIDS all right.
Around 1980: the first mention in the gay media. Something like 23 patients in New York and San Francisco. A doctor claimed that if a cure wasn’t found, there could be HUNDREDS of cases. Within a month my first funeral. By the time I left NYC, virtually everyone I knew was dead.
After all that, we now have a new generation, some of whom are actively seeking to contract HIV.
See “Bug Chasing” and “bareback”.
IIRC, the big problem is that HIV is a retrovirus - is this correct?
I know of exactly one vaccine for a retrovirus - Feline Leukemia - and that was a lifetime labor of love, if the story I heard is true.
(he loved her, she loved her cats; cats died of leukemia. He spent his life developing a vaccine to keep others from losing their beloved cats.)
Don’t know if true, but a wonderful tale either way.
It wasn’t even that long ago when here on the dope, folks would nag harp and cajole those posting about having gay sex to practice safe sex by wearing a condom. I don’t see anyone doing that anymore.
I first heard of that in the late 1990s, and the people do/did that engaged in multiple other high risk behaviors on top of it.
Aides were around long before AIDS. And most were not contagious. 
From what I understood, people thought AIDS was something only the gay got. That most of the time it wasn’t really a risk. The sensationalist headlines and suff in the 80s was more about getting people to realize that it WAS a risk and that it was becoming serious. And if you were really worried about it, was it really that hard to be monogamous?
I read both the original version of this book, which came out around 1990, and the updated version that was issued several years later. Which reminds me that I should read it again. IDK if it’s been further updated.
As you can imagine, it was HIGHLY controversial at the time.
I think it was the winter of '81–'82 that 60 Minutes ran a feature called “Patient Zero,” in which they tracked the origins of the disease in the West. It was already a big deal by then. They interviewed one dude (a flight attendant, I think) who they estimated had anonymous sex with at least 400 men in the course of one year.* When they suggested he might want to slow down, he threw a hissy fit and said “I can have sex with whoever I want!”
Mark Harmon as Dr Bobby Caldwell on St Elsewhere contracted HIV the winter of '85–'86. Liberace died of AIDS in February '87. Some bimbo on PBS hosted a documentary on the AIDS epidemic around the same time in which she asked “Whose fault is it? Is it the government’s, for not finding a cure?” (Yeah, right: One cure, coming right up!)
AIDS was one of the hottest topics of the '80s.
*And I wish I could have sex with 400 women in the course of my life! 
The problem is that you are also sleeping with everybody your partner ever slept with [and vice versa] so just staying monogamous is no solution, you had to both be virginal as well.