The CDC's June 5, 1981 edition of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) contained a startling publication: five males had been identified with a rare lung infection. All of them had been considered healthy before their diagnoses, and tragically, two died not long after receiving a diagnosis of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. These five men, all from Los Angeles, California, would go down in history as the first recorded cases of what the world would eventually come to know as HIV/AIDS.
What happened next might surprise you. Despite the fact that more than 300 people received diagnoses of a virus marked by a "suppressed immune system" throughout 1981, the media barely took notice. That began to shift as the virus kept spreading during the early 1980s and public awareness slowly grew. The CDC officially started using the name "AIDS" for those infected by 1982, while the informal label "gay pneumonia" made its way into everyday conversation. It took until mid-1983 — when the New York Times ran a front-page article — for the general public to truly grasp how widespread AIDS had become.
The mid-1980s brought an even more alarming escalation of the epidemic. Confirmed AIDS cases surged by 89% by 1985, with that single year producing more diagnoses than the entire period from 1981 to 1984 combined. Public panic spread rapidly, fueled by poor understanding of how the virus was transmitted and deep stigma attached to the diagnosis — and that panic severely undermined efforts to contain the disease. Making matters worse, no effective treatment existed at the time, and the mortality rate remained devastatingly high.
A turning point arrived in 1987 when the FDA gave its approval to AZT, the first antiviral drug designed to combat the disease. This landmark decision represented a major breakthrough in the battle against HIV/AIDS — AZT could slow HIV's progression to full-blown AIDS and brought down mortality rates among infected individuals. Since then, a range of additional treatments have emerged to help manage the disease and keep patients stable. While HIV/AIDS is now considered manageable with proper treatment, new infections have never stopped appearing. In 2023, 39,000 individuals received an HIV diagnosis in the United States. According to the CDC, several risk factors drive this persistently high number, including a lack of awareness, ongoing stigma, and the use of injection for recreational drug use.