The CDC reported the first cases of what became AIDS
On this day · 5 June 1981
A terse weekly bulletin about a rare pneumonia in five Los Angeles men was the opening line of the AIDS epidemic.
On June 5, 1981, the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report carried a short, clinical item titled “Pneumocystis Pneumonia — Los Angeles.” It described five previously healthy young men, all gay, treated at three different hospitals for a lung infection normally seen only in people with badly weakened immune systems. Two had already died.
The authors couldn’t explain why otherwise fit men were collapsing the same way. All five also had cytomegalovirus and fungal infections — a telltale pattern of immune failure.
It is the document now recognized as the first official report of the disease later named AIDS.
The bulletin’s understated tone belied what followed. Within weeks, similar reports poured in; the cause, HIV, would not be identified for two more years. Four decades on, those two flat pages mark the moment the epidemic entered the medical record.
Sources & references
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