AIDS—Unique in World History!
AS RECENTLY as 1981 the disease AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) was generally unknown. Now it has spread to almost every continent, and the world is panicking.
AIDS attacks the human immune system—the body’s mechanism for fighting disease. It renders its victims defenseless against rare cancers and other fatal illnesses. As many as a million Americans, and hundreds of thousands in other countries, may already have been exposed to this frightening disease.
Back in 1980-81, doctors in Los Angeles and New York began to encounter cases of a rare type of pneumonia called Pneumocystis carinii and a normally slow-growing cancer known as Kaposi’s sarcoma. All the victims were either young male homosexuals or drug abusers. Doctors called their symptoms “the immunologic consequences of some unknown process.”
Dr. Ward Cates, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, later said that this disease had a potential “much worse than anything mankind has seen before.” Infectious-disease expert Dr. John Seale concurred. Last summer, in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine of Britain, he said that AIDS is capable of producing “a lethal pandemic throughout the crowded cities and villages of the Third World of a magnitude unparalleled in human history.”
Sweeping the World
AIDS was first identified in the United States in 1981. From that small start, the number of its victims in this one country grew to 10,000 by April 1985 and to more than 16,500 by January of this year. Over 8,400 have already died, and no hope is held out for the rest, since AIDS is considered invariably fatal.
Recently, the number of victims reportedly has been doubling every nine months. If this rate would continue, by the end of the decade about half a million Americans will have come down with AIDS, almost as many as died in the great Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19. No wonder AIDS has been called “one of the most sinister infectious diseases of this or any other century”!
Although at first most known victims were in the United States, soon AIDS was sweeping the world. The New York Times reported: “The incidence of AIDS in Geneva and Paris now rivals that in Los Angeles, reflecting the surge of cases outside the United States.” And Time magazine of October 28, 1985, said: “In West Germany, which has 300 cases, the Robert Koch Institute estimates that there are 100,000 carriers of the HTLV-III virus.”
According to a report last spring, of the patients diagnosed in Europe, 61 percent died within a year—83 percent within three years.
Identifying the Cause
Early in 1984 two separate teams of researchers, on different continents, announced that they had isolated the AIDS virus. Professor Luc Montagnier at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute in the United States independently reported isolating the virus that is the probable cause of AIDS. This virus attacks a subgroup of white blood cells called T-4 lymphocytes. Thus, the French called it lymphadenopathy-associated virus (LAV), while the Americans called it human T-cell lymphotropic virus-III (HTLV-III).
Where did this international disease come from? How did it spread so rapidly? And what precautions would it be wise to take? These important questions are discussed in the following articles.
[Picture on page 3]
The AIDS virus budding from white blood cells
[Credit Line]
Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, Ga.