Did The US Have HIV And AIDS Cases Long Before It Was Finally Discovered?

What you're going to get is a lot of crackpot bullshit, which is exactly what you want to get.

The earliest known American case of HIV is Robert Rayford. We still aren't sure how he contracted it since he was just some midwestern teenager. Big mystery.

Robert Rayford did not have HIV. Debunked previously.

He was probably the victim of military experimentation with cadmium.

I am convinced my friend's little sister had it in the late 70s. She had leukemia -- but beat it, which was quite an accomplishment back then. She'd had multiple blood transfusions during the course of her treatment. A few years later, after having good health, she started getting sick, was in and out of hospitals, and died at 13 of systemic failure. The doctors even suspected the parents of some sort of Munchausen by proxy issues.

[quote]Robert Rayford did not have HIV. Debunked previously.

Link, please.

I was a medical transcriptionist for a while at Cedars-Sinai in LA starting about 1980. Suddenly, in 1981 a bunch of young men were admitted with Kaposi's sarcoma, which was supposed to occur only in older people and was until then a very rare disease. It was (is?) a 1200-bed hospital and had a big infectious disease unit. I've always remembered the year because the onset of multiple patients with this unusual illness was very sudden and we all talked about it and wondered what was up. Nobody called it AIDS or HIV of course at first. So if there were people with HIV/AIDS before that, they were not showing up with Kaposi's and not in great numbers.

Read " And The Band Played On", OP.

Far, far from a perfect book, but informative despite some of the flaws.

Seemed scientists believed there were a bunch of isolated deaths earlier than the full blown epidemic, aalthough it is never really clear what caused the full blown outbreak.

They thought average time between exposure and symptoms/illnesses was 5 to 6 years.

Once a test was developed and they were testing stored samples and donated blood, they knew a huge disaster was imminent.

I remember the stories about the 1976 celebration visitors and experimental drugs done by the government on gays as the sources of the virus in the US.

There was a death of Haitian immigrant in 1959 in New York that is believed to an HIV/AIDS death, due to the symptoms and illnesses the man had.

I also remember reading something about an American woman and her two or three kids who had some mystery illness in the mid 70s and doctors later believed they had HIV.

Craig Russel the Canadian drag performer said he started feeling sick around 1977 and only later did he correlate the symptoms with what was being seen in HIV patients in the 1980s.

Maybe, but since it was not discovered we are not sure.

[quote]Read " And The Band Played On", OP.

Didn't that book cite the 1976 "Tall Ships" bicentennial celebration in NYC as the turning point in the AIDS crisis? (I think there was a thread on this...)

In the late 1970s a lot of gay men were showing up with Hepatitis B when they had a blood test. Since it was usually contracted by IV drug users, doctors were confused as to why it was infecting non-IV-using, mostly gay men. It was like a precursor, confusing to both doctors and patients.

R13, here's the thread you're referring to:

Yes, it did .....R13 .... That is one of the questionable things, along with patient zero.

As others have said, there seems to have been random, isolated incidents prior to the Bicentennial .....but there was certainly a huge gathering of people there, so who knows ?

And The Band Played On is twenty plus years out of date.

There's a good (but long and overwritten) book about HIV and other diseases that went from animals to humans. It's called Spillover.

HIV came to the New World in the late 60s or possibly early 70s.

[quote]And The Band Played On is twenty plus years out of date.

Yes, it is 20 years out of date. But, if you want to get a sense of how things were from 1981-1985, it is the book to read.

And Shilts did not say outright that the Bicentennial celebrations in the US was when AIDS arrived here, because there was no proof. But he strongly suggested it was possible.

Again with the Patient Zero thing? It was never suggested that Patient Zero brought AIDS to the US. He was Patient Zero for the cluster of cases in NYC and LA, meaning they could all be traced to him somehow.

I don't know if it's true but I once read the first case was found in Africa in 1969.

R18 - It gives a sense of what life was like. It is a great journalistic work. I agree.

I was a teenager when HBO did the movie adaptation of And The Band Played On. I didn't read the book until around 2006 or 2007. I was in a bookstore looking at the used book section and found a copy. It was a bit outdated, but as other mentioned Shilts really detailed how society was at time and how different groups responded to the epidemic. I also liked how the rivalries between doctors were detailed.

Gallo was a dick.

I'm glad the French got the Nobel Prize.

The first US AIDS case was in 1969, coming from Haiti, after making it there via airplane from Africa.

AidS has been around for a long time in Africa, but air travel globalized it.

Duh. Nobel Prize winners say AIDs like herpes around forever. Not until a critical mass in segregated geography and sex pools did it matter. Bathhouses, muthafukahs! Read. learn. Think!

There was a hell of a lot of Fuck walking around Manhattan in July, 1976 (and the rest of the decade, for that matter).

That's untrue R23, but you know it's untrue. Not a single case documented in Haiti before 1982.

Was Gallo a dick? Or is there a logical explanation for what he did? You need to learn to think people.

Gallo is not such a mystery if you take off your blinders about how AIDS came to be.

Wasn't the Robert Rayford case debunked?

I cannot recommend And the Band Played On enough to you younger guys. Yes, it has its critics, but it's a great book. I was obsessed with it in the early 90s.

Scientists have genetically mapped the HIV virus and concluded that it made the jump from c h i m p s to humans in central Africa in the 1930s.

If people were diagnosed with what we later called AIDS in the early 80's it stands to reason that people became HIV+ in the 70's.

Another shout out for And the Band Played On!

Shilts was a great writer and makes the entire history so engrossing.

Shilts also wrote a really good book about gays in the military

I don't know call me a conspiracy theorist but I don't buy it. I don't buy all this it came from Haiti and it was suddenly in the US and Europe business.

The four hour PBS documentary, "The Age of Aids" is the best work I have encountered detailing the global emergence, science, political, cultural and personal impact of the AIDS epidemic. It's a comprehensive experience, humane and devastating.

It's possible, OP. But I highly doubt it.

If there had been HIV or AIDS found in anyone that long ago (but not identified as such), the chances of the virus having been contained so as not to have been found in a great many other people at the same time, would be negligible.

And, if it had occurred, one would have expected to have found then, as one did in the early 80s, a marked sudden increase in rare and or usually non-fatal opportunistic infections causing death in greatly unexpected magnitude at that point.

Since neither of these occurred, it's far more likely that the virus was not around then.

Wasn't there some (actually not gay) Norwegian sailor or something?

[quote]Wasn't there some (actually not gay) Norwegian sailor or something?

That was Arvid Noe. He wasn't gay. He slept with African prostitutes when he was a sailor in Africa. Medical records from that time show that he was treated for gonorrhea. IIRC, he didn't start showing symptoms until he was back in Norway and married and had a family. His wife and his youngest daughter both had AIDS. He died first, then the wife, and then the daughter.

Robert Raiford did not have AIDS.

That Robert St Louis teenager did NOT have HIV. Many books have stated this.

No one was ever able to reproduce the HIV that Robert supposedly had. It was cross contamination. Many of the late 80s test were riddled with cross contamination.

The earliest undisputed sample comes from 1959.

But there are other leads going back to the mid 1800s, where in central Congo, diseases matching AIDS to a tee, were described. They died out very quickly. Much like the ebola and Marburg outbreaks did in the 60s and 70s. They just came and went.

Very extensive article published within the past few months, shows the genesis, growth & travel of AIDS, from early 1900s Brazzaville in Africa, to Europe & North America, over the course of nearly 80 yrs.

Originated with someone there getting infected with HIV from either monkey meat getting into an open cut or a bite. Then it spread to local prostitutes, who fucked the (primarily) Belgian miners & traders, in addition to their own husbands, etc.

The advent of global air travel allowed HIV to "escape" from its natural habitat & spread across the world.

The US govt claims the AIDS epidemic began "officially" in 1982. Looking back, there is much anecdotal & medical evidence to strongly suggest it was already underway in the mid-late 1970s.

It was just that no one had yet connected the dots among the victims, mostly until Kaposi's sarcoma became the common thread among the infection clusters in places like NYC,SF & LA. Kaposi's was a very rare occurrence up to that point.

There is no sample from 1959. The 1959 British sailor was entirely a cross-contamination. Robert Raiford never had the virus and whatever antibody tests gave that result were incorrect.

Don't they trace alot of it back to the Congo region in Africa, and say that it probably really started to flourish due to the mass social dislocation caused by colonialism?

Take note SJW's-you blather about colonialism alot, but here's an actual catastophe at least partially caused by *real* colonialism

Here is a handy timeline of HIV/AIDS spread, going back to the early 1900s.

And the Robert Rayford case has NOT been debunked. It was confirmed as HIV multiple times.

Not true R44; in fact, that's a complete lie.

Looking forward to your citations, R45.

The timeline is bullshit. Believe it or not HIV is not the only thing which compromises immune systems. Radiation poisoning, cadmium poisoning, and plain old genetic defects can and do cause people to lack immunity to disease and therefore have a disease profile like HIV.

Furthermore, it is simply not plausible that all these tissue studies in Africa have been kept around for 30-50 years for later testing by medical researchers. This in places like Kinshasa and Kampala which don't even have reliable electricity for storing samples.

Horse manure.

R45, as someone requested earlier, link please. I keep seeing debunked claims, but zero evidence.

Our family knew a guy who died of AIDS in San Francisco in 1979. At the time it wasn't called AIDS and there was no stigma associated with his illness.

It was understood that he had contracted some mysterious rare virus.

And then came the 80's.

First of all, the presence of one case without a documented chain of custody could never be proof of previous HIV existence. Contamination is too easy and thirty years after Robert R. was proposed, he remains the only HIV case attributed to the United States, which means it is likely NOT HIV at all since HIV is a transmissable disease and no place in the world is more likely to have old blood and tissue samples properly stored than the United States. One case proves nothing even if it were true.

However, in this case we have additional problems. 1) the original test used Western Blot to find the antibodies to the virus, which had a high false positive rate in 1982; 2) the authors of that study said the doctors "doubted" Robert R.'s story that he felt bad after having sex with a girl by claiming he had ks around his anus, which of course would not be typical of homosexuals either and unrelated to sexual activity generally, a curiously unprofessional attempt to suggest Robert R. was gay; and 3) an attempt to find the actual virus in RR's blood in 1990 using genetic sequencing failed, suggesting there wasn't any HIV. Furthermore 4) minorities in St. Louis were subjected to chemical and radiological warfare experiments in the 1950s and 1960s that could have and probably did have serious health consequences and this could be the real reason Pruitt-Igoe was dynamited in 1972, to hide the evidence.

"In 1984, researcers published evidence that 'Robert R.,' a fifteen year-old black, male, heterosexual, born and reared in St. Louis, had died of AIDS-like illnesses. Later, in 1987, scientists provided evidence that the boy's blood contained antibodies to HIV....By 1990, advanced gene analysis techniques allowed scientists to re-examine this case, at which time they determined that 'Robert R.' had not died of AIDS. His blood never contained HIV."

This is from Horowitz, "Emerging Viruses" 1996, 1997. The 1987 Western Blot test for antibodies (you will recall this had a high false positive problem in 1987) was footnoted to be "Garry, RF, Witte MH, Gottlieb, A., e al. "Documentation of an AIDS virus infection in the United States in 1968" JAMA 1988:260:2085-2087"

The 1990 revision was footnoted as Laurie Garrett, "The Coming Plague" but this footnote appears to be wrong.

And the Raiford story is even more suspicious. The claim that his antibodies tested positive were leaked to the popular press before the scientific work was done, there was a break-in at the lab where results were stolen, and the author claimed it was a "rare early strain" almost identical to the one in paris but not the one infected everyone....we now know of course that Gallo borrowed Montaignier's virus so it was the same and this talk where he made this claim was not supported by any evidence at all.

In short, it looks like the whole thing was a disinformation campaign.

Indeed, the break-in at the lab proves the lab had poor security and the samples could have been tampered with to get that result.

One case is not proof of anything because for a contagious sexually transmitted disease, it has to be assumed to not real unless plausibly supported by other nearby cases.

High false positive rate in 1987, not 1982.

The same is true of other alleged cases.

This may not be the right thread, but I'll ask the question anyway.

On sites like Adam4Adam, I see several guys list their status as "HIV Undetectable." Does that mean that the test gives a false positive or what exactly does that mean?

[quote]I honestly I have to find a good book.

No, honey, you need to buy a fucking clue. Most of the information you seek can be found on Wikipedia.

R55: It means you should wear a head to toe condom whenever you go out in public, because you haven't a clue about how to protect yourself.

But it really does mean that the guy in question has a viral load that has become undetectable, due to his HIV medication regimen.

That does NOT mean he doesn't have HIV, so you should have safe sex with anyone & everyone, anyway.

If you don't know what safe sex is, you need to sit down with a qualified MD & have them explain it to you, for your own good.

Half the people on this thread sound like they're posting from a time warp to 1990.

Can you get it from kissing? When did it start? What's the difference between AIDS and HIV? Durrrrrrrr...

Still waiting for an actual link that contains research and reporting to back up your claims, R50/R51/R52, otherwise you're just yapping like a tinhat.

Most of the biochem scientists who were killed in the early 2000s had one thing in common: they worked on the genetic sequencing of HIV. It may not be a coincidence that most of the evidence for complicity comes from the government's admitted behavior, not from "research."

Shorter interview with Dr. Maurice Hilleman, Merck vaccine director.

SHORTER: Tell me, how did you find SV40 (monkey virus) in the polio vaccine?

HILLEMAN: Well, that was a Merck thing. I can tell you very briefly...I came to Merck and I was going to develop vaccines, and we had wild viruses...you remember those wild monkey kidney viruses. And I finally gave up. I said you can't develop vaccines with these damn monkeys....If I can't do something, I'm going to quit.

So Hilleman went to Bill Mann, director of the Washington Zoo, who told him to

HILLEMAN: 'go ahead, get your monkeys out of West Africa. Get the African green. Bring them into Madrid. Unload them there. There are no other traffic through there for animals. Fly them into Philadelphia and pick them up. Or fly them into New York and pick them up right off the airplane.'

HILLEMAN: So, I brought African greens in. I didn't know we were importing AIDS virus at the time. (laughter in the studio)

SHORTER: Why didn't the greens have the wild viruses since they came from Africa?

HILLEMAN: Because they weren't being infected in these group holding things with all these other 40 different viruses.

SHORTER: But they had the ones they brought from the jungle, though?

HILLEMAN: Yeah, they had those, but there were relatively few. What you do is if you have gang housing then you're going to have an epidemic transmission of infection in a confined space....So anyway, the greens came in, and now we had these, and then we're taking our seed stocks to clean them up, and God, now I'm discovering new viruses. So I said, 'Judas Priest!'

Hilleman was asked to give a talk an an international meeting of scientists, so

HILLEMAN: I'm going to talk about the detection of non-detectable viruses...So I thought gee that damn SV40, I mean, I mean that damn ...agent that we have, I'm going to pick that particular one. So I picked it, and quick worked it up, and I thought, boy now, that virus has got to be in the vaccines. And it's got to be in Sabin's vaccine. So I tested it, and sure enough it was in there.

SHORTER: So you just took stocks of Sabin's vaccine off the shelf here at Merck.

HILLEMAN: Yeah it was made at Merck.

SHORTER: You were making it for Sabin at this point?

HILLEMAN: Yeah, it was made before I came.

SHORTER: Yeah, but at this point Sabin was just doing these massive field trials?

HILLEMAN: Uh huh. In Russia and so forth.

HILLEMAN: We had taken this virus and put it into hamsters....So the joke of the day was that we would win the Olympics because the Russians wold be loaded down with tumors.

Hilleman broke the news to Sabin who said,

HILLEMAN: 'This is just another obfuscation that is going to upset vaccines.' I said, 'well, you know, you're absolutely right, but we have a new era here, an era of detection. And the important thing is to get rid of these viruses.'

SHORTER: Well, why did he call it an obfuscation if it was a virus that was contaminating the vaccine?

HILLEMAN: Well now, because there were 40 different viruses in these vaccines anyway that we were inactivating and ah

SHORTER: But you weren't inactivating the...

HILLEMAN: No that's right. But yellow fever vaccine had leukemia virus in it, and you know this is in the days of very crude science. So anyway I went down and talked to him. He said, 'Why are you concerned about it?' I said, I have a feeling down in my bones that this virus is different. I don't know how to tell you this, but I've been around vaccines for a long time and I just think this virus may have some long-term effects.' Sabin asked what kind. I said, 'Cancer.'

[quote]Most of the biochem scientists who were killed in the early 2000s

???

HILLEMAN: We had no press release on it. Obviously you don't go out, this was a scientific affair within the scientific community. But anyway, the next thing you know we had run out activation curves on these things. We knew it wsa in our seed stock for making vaccine...We'd run it down and it would all be killed you see. But when we were able technologically to grow more virus, we found it wasn't being inactivated. That virus, you see, has one in 10,000 particles is not inactivated by formaldehyde. Which was a very strange phenomenon....

HILLEMAN: (SV40 was in) the same family, you know, that causes progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy. All of us carry it. You get immunosuppressed and you come down with this head disease (encephalitis).

And did they clean up their act? In 1972 Lederle found simian cytomegaloviruses in green monkeys it was using for polio vaccine production. In 1995 doctors were finding SV40 gene sequences in emphysema and brain tumours. Green monkeys were still being used for vaccines.

R58, what are you on about? I think one poster asked a question in that vein.

R62, that would be by the Illuminati I'm guessing. There's always someone.

R33 Its called "Conduct Unbecoming" and speaks to the historical reference of gays in not only the US but armies around the world. The title gets its name from the reason stated on a gay person's file for their dishonorable discharge if they were found out to be gay or even bi.,

R49 it was called G.R.I.D. Gay Related Immune Deficiency. At the time in the US the primary victims were gay men.

I have to also lend my voice to the others who have stated Randy Shiltis book "And the Band Played On" is the definitive early novel on the impact of HIV and AIDS in the U.S. It spoke to all aspects of the illness and its impact on American society at all levels and in all walks of life.

Just after 9.11 scientists around the world began to meet with accidents.

More AIDS scientists killed just recently.

Trolldar r60 and watch the thread light up gold.

Yes OP. This is an old thread but apparently HIV was in NYC in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

R5 That is freaky, do you think maybe it could have been Hepatitis C? Hep C was also around in the 1970s and 1980s but they did not know it as it was not officially named/diagnosed until 1989.

It is weird how the CDC and Chrion corporation got into a legal battle based on patents and the discovery of the virus.

History In the mid-1970s, Harvey J. Alter, Chief of the Infectious Disease Section in the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, and his research team demonstrated how most post-transfusion hepatitis cases were not due to hepatitis A or B viruses. Despite this discovery, international research efforts to identify the virus, initially called non-A, non-B hepatitis (NANBH), failed for the next decade. In 1987, Michael Houghton, Qui-Lim Choo, and George Kuo at Chiron Corporation, collaborating with Daniel W. Bradley at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, used a novel molecular cloning approach to identify the unknown organism and develop a diagnostic test.[122] In 1988, Alter confirmed the virus by verifying its presence in a panel of NANBH specimens. In April 1989, the discovery of HCV was published in two articles in the journal Science.[123][124] The discovery led to significant improvements in diagnosis and improved antiviral treatment.[9][122] In 2000, Drs. Alter and Houghton were honored with the Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research for "pioneering work leading to the discovery of the virus that causes hepatitis C and the development of screening methods that reduced the risk of blood transfusion-associated hepatitis in the U.S. from 30% in 1970 to virtually zero in 2000."[125]

Chiron filed for several patents on the virus and its diagnosis.[126] A competing patent application by the CDC was dropped in 1990 after Chiron paid $1.9 million to the CDC and $337,500 to Bradley. In 1994, Bradley sued Chiron, seeking to invalidate the patent, have himself included as a coinventor, and receive damages and royalty income. He dropped the suit in 1998 after losing before an appeals court.[127]

R10 I have read the theory that IV drug users in the mid or late 1970s in NYC were dying of 'junkie flu' or 'junkie pneumonia'; but IV drug users do not care about their health, and will go without eating, sleeping, etc. as the drug takes over their lives and what a friend who is a polydrug addict who got sober told me, how if you IV drugs you basically do not care if you live or die and you will put getting high first before everything else even your own health, and even when faced with having to go out and buy new needles or exchange old ones for new ones, versus sharing a needle that most IV drug addicts will think nothing of sharing a needle and don't care if they become HIV+ or Hep C, etc.

That's very true R18. Millenial and Gen Z'ers are rather harsh on 'And the band played on...' while for us Gen X'ers or for people who were around in the 1980s or early 1990s it was relevant for its time. I have noticed how now that it has been discovered or confirmed that HIV showed up sometime in 1969 or 1970 how the media is now claiming that Gaetan Dugas is 'exonerated' when in fact he did knowingly infect others with HIV. Yes I know that it was the 1980s and HIV/AIDS was extremely new and not everyone was certain at first how it was spread or how you could be infected; but Dugas knew he was infected with HIV and living with AIDS and had unprotected sex anyway and infected lots of men.

Now we have an AIDS bump bitch.

[quote] No, honey, you need to buy a fucking clue. Most of the information you seek can be found on Wikipedia.

Yes. The site where anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information.

Yes, it was thought to be a rare type of "cancer" or "pneumonia" before it was identified. The article explains more.

On Jan 4 2020, R73 responds to a post from 2014. The mind boggles at the lack of information literacy.

I dont know who or what is so invested in making everyone think hiv was around forever,but I just dont believe that . I was a VERY sexually active teenager in the 70s , and my city's gay community was positively incestuous because of the times . We all knew each other,we all fucked each other ,yet no one I ever knew was sick ( except for the occasional std ) .Then the 80s hit ,and almost overnight so many people were getting sick and dying rapidly . I know I sound like a loon , but nothing will convince me it wasnt a government experiment gone hideously wrong . it wasnt there ,then suddenly it was . If it was around in the 60s -70s ,you'd think all those people both straight and gay fucking like rabbits would have caused it to surface sooner .

Science and epidemiology does not care what you believe. There are isolated documented cases here and there, out of Africa, well before the 80s. It simply wasn't in your town. Also There were likely some infections in major International cities through the 70s because HIV does not create AIDS overnight. But you knew that. Or you would if you could read anything beyond your navel.

Pre-1980

It is widely believed that HIV originated in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo around 1920 when HIV crossed species from chimpanzees to humans. Up until the 1980s, we do not know how many people were infected with HIV or developed AIDS. HIV was unknown and transmission was not accompanied by noticeable signs or symptoms.

While sporadic cases of AIDS were documented prior to 1970, available data suggests that the current epidemic started in the mid- to late 1970s. By 1980, HIV may have already spread to five continents (North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Australia). In this period, between 100,000 and 300,000 people could have already been infected.1

I'm not a conspiracy fan but have many times had thoughts like R78

No.

It's an odd disease with odd symptoms that could not have gone undetected for any great length of time. Early misdiagnosis is of course possible, but in isolated and sporadic cases - and isolated and sporadic cases, one on the continent in one decade, two in other parts of another continent in another decade, that's not how infectious disease spread.

Of course there were probably early deaths the causes of which went undetected or were misattributed to something else, but not large numbers and not over great lengths of time. To not understand that is to not under how the common cold spreads, or to refuse logic in favor of illogic.

R78, by your logic the coronavirus should also be under the government conspiracy umbrella. And the bubonic plague.

After all, they came out of nowhere and are suddenly here.

An older friend of mine said that in nyc and San Francisco, many gay clubs in the late 70s and into 1980, offered free vaccines for hepatitis. It was a program backed by those cities’ municipal governments. Many thought those vaccines may have been tainted. Conspiracy crap I’m sure. But odd the timing and the swift manifestation to full blown epidemic.

I didn’t read the rest of the thread, because I’m not interested in conspiracy theories, but the virus was probably introduced a few times and infected isolated individuals (possibly as early as the 1950s) before it found somewhere to “take hold” (CA and NYC) in the late ‘70s.

What I never understood was whey there was a sudden rash of karposi patients in 81 and then 82, when there supposedly is a long incubation period before symptoms arrive.

Did they all get it back in 75/76 and then simultaneously started getting sick? I'm sure there's a more simple explanation, but the suddenness of it all seemed surprising considering it's not like an infectious flu.

[quote] karposi patients

Oh, dear!!

R83, it may not have been a conspiracy in the sense of intentional, but if they reused the same needles on a few different people....

While it’s unfathomable to even think they would do something like that today, it wasn’t so unheard of back then.

[quote]What I never understood was whey there was a sudden rash of karposi patients in 81 and then 82, when there supposedly is a long incubation period before symptoms arrive.

The incubation period is highly variable. I knew a guy who tested negative for HIV when he entered the army back in the early 90s. He was discharged five months later when he got sick -- and he was dead within a year.

The incubation period isn’t all that long. The first men diagnosed probably contracted it in the late ‘70s.

R88 is correct. I should’ve said it doesn’t have to be that long. The first diagnosed cases weren’t necessarily walking around with it for 6-7 years, and probably weren’t.

The most interesting info for this thread was understanding why it was more widespread in NYC and SF - and LA. The Petri dish of contagion those cities provided meant the number of cases - even per capita - were much higher than smaller, less transient cities like Philly, St Louis or Dallas.

It always struck me as strange that AIDS didn’t seem to “hit” as hard outside of those cities. But now understanding the timing and method of transmission based on the studies of the strain of HIV present by year throughout the 70s in NY and then SF, it makes sense that they were hit first and hardest. Smaller cities had somewhat of a warning because they got the news of what was happening there before it was as widespread. It really was a blessing to miss out on the gay Mecca’s of the 70s.

So some people got HIV, developed AIDS and died in a matter of months? That's what it seems - I guess it is variable, but they always talk about all of the infected people who don't know they're infected.

The virus has evolved since the early days of the epidemic, and used to be a lot nastier. I think a longer incubation period is probably more common now than it used to be. During the worst part of the epidemic, most people died within ~2 years of diagnosis.

But yes, some people died within months of being diagnosed.

R93, I think a lot of that has to do with earlier testing and screening, obviously in addition to meds.

In the beginning, one wasn’t generally diagnosed until they were quite ill, usually with Kaposi’s sarcoma. By then of course it was too late.

R78 Where were you from? I have heard from older bisexual and gay men who were from Southern California near Los Angeles who also were highly active in their 20s in the 1970s with men in bars or nearby sex clubs/baths, and said how there were other diseases but how what is now known as HIV/AIDS, but was then known as "GRIDS" or "gay cancer" started to appear in the media in 1982 or 1983 and it was thought to be caused by poppers or Amyl, and that it came out of nowhere. They don't think it was some government or chemical weapon unleashed on the public to kill bisexual and gay men and IV drug users; but they said how everyone else died around them including their best friends while they stayed HIV negative. Some claim it was because they are more into oral sex and were very picky who they had anal sex with but how nobody was using condoms as safer sex was not invented and it was not then known then how HIV was spread as it was that new. Two friends told me how they had unprotected anal sex as bottoms multiple times with men who happened to be HIV+ or living with AIDS and they have no clue how they were not infected. One friend went to an orgy in 1982 or 1983 and used condoms for fucking two of the men there but sucked others there and said how within a year the other six men at the orgy had all died from HIV/AIDS.

Also R78 a bisexual friend told me how he was sexually active in Central and Northern California in the 1970s and early 1980s but how HIV/AIDS did not wind up in the small town he was from in Northern CA until the mid 1980s.

R95 I grew up in Florida . Its always been a highly transient place ,but until the early 70s when Disney was built it was more retirees than tourist . I remember when Orlando wasnt that big ! That being said ,it was also (and still is to a great extent ) way behind the times in cultural shifts,so being gay was always frowned upon well into the 90s . Even in larger cities . So the gay communities were rather insular out of necessity . I remember several times gay bars being busted for lewd behavior when they had male strippers . I grew up in Jax Fl wich was always referred to as southern Georgia .

It was around 1982 or so when all of a sudden people I knew started getting sick,then dying . We were all in shock because most were young like us . I remember the poppers rumor,as well as the rumor that only people with multiple stds were vunerable . But you combine drugs with booze and a repressed area and you still partied like it was 1975 . I remember going to the local tubs and having to wait to get in . Ive said many times it is truly a miracle I didnt end up poz ,I slept with EVERYBODY .