AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) is a devastating pandemic of recent years. It is not exactly a disease but a medical condition in humans, in which their immune system suffers a progressive but often fatal failure. This medical condition is caused by the infection of the slow-acting human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which evidently exists in several strains. The HIV tends to infect primarily the immune system and the central nervous system, with the clinical manifestations of AIDS being consequent on damage to these two systems.

AIDS is believed to have occurred first in the late 1950s in Africa, probably by several mutations of a retrovirus transmitted from green monkeys to humans in Haiti, where the animals are eaten. Yet the first report of five AIDS-like cases was published in the USA three decades later on June 5, 1981, by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. These cases involved five male homosexual patients being treated in Los Angeles for an unusual form of pneumonia. Then on July 3, a month later following the June account, another 26 cases of homosexual patients with Kaposi’s sarcoma were reported in the same weekly publication.

As pointed out by Schoub (1999), it was these relatively unremarkable few cases of homosexual male patients with unusual infections and uncommon tumors that “heralded in an epidemic of one of the most devastating of all diseases of humankind.”