HIV particle. Russell Kightley Media
I was alerted via Twitter this morning to the fact that the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly report that reported the first recognition of the syndrome we now know as AIDS, was published on 5th of June 1981. It appears – sadly – that their archive only goes back to 1982: there’s a missed chance to expose some history, CDC?!
Thirty five years: I was a novice lecturer, just starting out; the Web was still science fiction; HIV and its relatives were still undiscovered – but they had already started to spread out of Africa, after smouldering away in the tropical forests of Gabon and the Congos for decades.
I started an information web page on HIV/AIDS back in 2000 or so, largely in response to the ridiculousness of Thabo Mbeki’s pronouncements on the virus and the disease: thanks to tectonic shifts in the UCT Web policy, these disappeared – but thanks to the invaluable Wayback Machine, can still be found. If you want a slice of history, and to see how bad I am at designing web pages, go take a look. Still MOSTLY valid, although many of the links are now dead – sic transit the web content, unfortunately!
And here we are in 2016: I’m now an elderly academic, the Honours student who alerted me to the fact the the “GRIDS” syndrome virus may have been identified in 1983 is now a senior Professor and distinguished HIV researcher – there’s a whole career there, Carolyn! – and HIV/AIDS is still with us. And unfortunately, Thabo Mbeki is still being wilfully if not malevolently ignorant, and I am still feeling it necessary to crap on him.
At least the pandemic appears to have peaked in terms of incidence, and ARVs are increasingly good and employed widely; however, we still don’t have a decent vaccine, and people are still being infected. This pandemic will last out my career – but hopefully not those of some of the people I have trained.
ViroBlogy 
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