40 years ago, the first cases of AIDS were reported in the US
On June 5, 1981, a curious report appeared in the Center for Disease Control’s weekly public health digest: Five young, gay men across Los Angeles had been diagnosed with an unusual lung infection known as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) — and two of them had died.
It was the first time that acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) — the devastating advanced-stage of HIV infection that would go on to claim the lives of more than 32 million people globally — was reported in the US.
Days after the initial report hit the newspapers, the CDC learned of many more such cases in gay men. Not only did those men have PCP, they also had other secondary infections, among them a rare and aggressive cancer known as Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS).