I know a gay guy who went through two years of thinking he was positive, because the ELISA and Western Blot were both positive and he had two W. Blots.
But when it became possible to actually see the virus in someone’s blood, the fact that he was completely symptom free after 2 years, and just AZT, made him a candidate for this test-- for research purposes.
The virus was not found.
There is a small group of people with a factor in their blood that causes the ELISA to test positive, and the 2 W. Blots were bad luck (and an example of the law of very large numbers).
He definitely is negative-- he tests negative on current tests, and practiced safe sex, until he found a partner he has been with for 20 years, and they both tested negative. He horrible two years of thinking he was positive back in the 80s, and was so careful after that.
Yeah, I had a friend whose partner had AIDS; the friend’s Western Blot kept returning an ambiguous result until a few years later it became consistently negative.
A question that occurs to me… in the 80’s when many seemed to be dying of AIDS was that because it was killing people faster, or was it that AIDS still took up to years to manifest; that the number of people dying was simply the fact that so many over many years had been infected unawares? That symptomatic AIDS onset was not as particularly rapidly lethal as the media impled back then?
Very much unlike OG SARS from the early 2000s, by the way. Back then, people only became infectious once symptoms set in, making that virus much more manageable.
Obviously true for many viruses, but not all. Some vector-borne viruses, for example, can actually be spread more easily if they quickly incapacitate, but not outright kill, their host. If you’re too sick to move much, it makes the mosquitoes’ job a lot easier.
Until there was a test for it, the only way to be diagnosed was to developed an AIDS-related illness. And there were a few illnesses that were ambiguously AIDS-related, so it took the illness, plus a known exposure.
What I mean by the latter, is that some illnesses were only contracted by people with HIV, so if you got one, you had HIV. Others were common among the HIV+, but did show up in HIV- people-- usually older people, or people with some other factor that made them susceptible, so they could be winnowed out-- then, the patients with no other possible factor were asked about their past exposures, and if there were a potential way they could have been exposed to HIV. If there were, it was investigated, and if it turned out to be positive, then the person could be diagnosed.
For several years, people just had AIDS, or they didn’t. The term “HIV positive” did not exist. It wasn’t until a blood test was developed to detect antibodies to HIV that a person could be diagnosed as having HIV, but still be in good health, possibly to remain that way for years.
The ELISA test became available in 1985, the year I graduated from high school. But AIDS had been in the news at least since the end of my Freshman year.
And, as I understand it, while researchers realized that what would come to be known as AIDS was clustered among homosexual men, it wasn’t until ~1983 when it was determined that it was being spread via sexual contact (or via infected blood).
So, it was only at that point where the advice around safe sex (particularly for sexually active homosexual men) in order to avoid AIDS began to be given – and by then, many had already had the HIV virus for years.
And there were scientists coming back from Africa and Haiti saying, “hey, we think this is the same disease but straight people have it” and for a long time, they were ignored.
For a few years, in the US, it was called GRID by the medical community– “Gay-Related Immune Disorder.”
Even before that, Kaposi’s sarcoma was being called “gay cancer.”
And this even though on the east coast it was a bigger problem among IV drug users. The difference, a friend of mine theorized, was that the gay men in California getting it could afford to go to hospitals, and the addicts in New York were just dying on the streets, and being diagnosed posthumously.
When I was 15, and first learned about AIDS, whether or not being gay was inborn was a big controversy, and a big factor in the gay civil rights struggle. I remember going over and over it in my mind-- if gay people can get a disease that straight people can’t get, this is BIG evidence that they are ontologically different-- otherwise, eventually, everybody is going to have this disease.
Dark humor joke told to me by my good friend’s gay brother in the early 80s. “The worst part about having AIDS is trying to convince your parents that you’re Haitian”.
My cousin Bill (step father’s first cousin) lived in Santa Cruz and was a free spirit who was a regular at the bathhouses. He was one of the very early victims. I was there when my mom got the call that he was in the hospital and near the end. She said, “I wonder if he has that thing that the gay men are getting.”
By the time I was a college freshman in 1982 in San Diego, we were heavily indoctrinated about AIDS prevention and condoms and that you could get it from straight sex.
The Boston Women’s Health Collective put out an edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1983 (that I obtained in 1984), and discussed AIDS. It gave a summary of the latest research, and stressed using condoms, and that no other form of birth control offered real protection-- but then it concluded with a sentence that was something like “If you don’t use IV drugs, and your boyfriend isn’t bisexual, you don’t have much to worry about.”
Recognizing that AIDS wasn’t restricted to gay men or that in could be spread via infected blood may have taken longer, but it known to be sexually transmitted by the time I graduated from high school in 1981.