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Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)
- patdennis 13y agoThis is the first New York Times article reporting on what would later be known as the AIDS epidemic. Edit: Here's the takeaway quote, in my opinion: "Cancer is not believed to be contagious, but conditions that might precipitate it, such as particular viruses or environmental factors, might account for an outbreak among a single group." Edit2: "Dr. Curran said there was no apparent danger to nonhomosexuals from contagion.'"
- kmfrk 13y agoEven today, people have a very poor understanding on how you can - rather can't - contract it from HIV+ people, alas. (Not saying that HIV==AIDS.) http://aids.gov/hiv-aids-basics/hiv-aids-101/how-you-get-hiv-aids/ http://aids.gov/hiv-aids-basics/hiv-aids-101/how-you-get-hiv... If an HIV+ person sneezes in an elevator, some will have a panic attack, I reckon. Not to mention the travel bans some countries impose. 1) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/30/hiv-travel-ban-lifted-by_n_340109.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/30/hiv-travel-ban-lift... 2) http://plwha.org/ http://plwha.org/ 3) http://www.unaids.org/en/targetsandcommitments/eliminatingtravelrestrictions/ http://www.unaids.org/en/targetsandcommitments/eliminatingtr... Still much work to be done in informing people, so let this be an opportunity to ask your friends and family whether they know their facts on the matter, as HIV+ people are treated like lepers oftentimes. Bonus trivia for reading along this far: Andrew Sullivan is HIV+. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sullivan#Personal_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sullivan#Personal_life
- seiji 13y ago(Not saying that HIV==AIDS.) Why make that disclaimer?
- snowwrestler 13y agoNot everyone who is HIV-positive develops AIDS.
- jaggederest 13y agoAs an example, Magic Johnson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Johnson#HIV_activism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Johnson#HIV_activism
- akiselev 13y agoActually, I think the going medical opinion is that, except for new mutated strains (and they'd have to be heavily mutated), anyone who contracts HIV today is never going to develop AIDS if they have access to modern treatment options (for the rest of their life).
- snowwrestler 13y agoSome people who are HIV positive never develop AIDS even without drugs.
- kmfrk 13y agoIt's an important distinction - and a mistake that many make - but more than anything, I didn't want some asshat to derail the message of my comment by nitpicking about this to appear smart and insightful. This sometimes happens, unfortunately. Even I can't remember the details, but for anyone whose curiosity has been picqued, this explains it well: http://www.aids.org/topics/aids-faqs/difference-between-hiv-and-aids/ http://www.aids.org/topics/aids-faqs/difference-between-hiv-....
- seiji 13y agoAh, got it. At first I thought you were one of those crazy people saying AIDS isn't caused by HIV.
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- tshaddox 13y agoThe travel bans constitute inappropriate discrimination in my opinion, but they don't imply a misunderstanding of AIDS transmission. People can travel to a country and have sex there.
- theorique 13y agoWow, this is back when it was called GRID.
- baxter001 13y agoThis is back before it was discovered to be an immune deficiency.
- wisty 13y agoBeing a little picky, GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) was certainly thought to be an immune deficiency. But they didn't know it was acquired, or that it was a virus, or that it wasn't just gay related, or anything else much.
- res0nat0r 13y agoI'm currently reading And The Band Played On which is a detailed account of the rise of the AIDS epidemic and how it was ignored and mishandled back in the 80s. Definitely check it out if this subject interests you.
- tptacek 13y agoCurious: if we call t_0 1981, the Kaposi's Sarcoma article, and t_x 1996, the advent of HAART, and consider (t_x - t_0) "the AIDS epidemic" --- ignoring the ongoing epidemics in Sub-Saharan African and India, which are enormous problems but somewhat orthogonal to the problem described by your book --- what comparably lethal disease in human history was more effectively addressed by the medical establishment? How can we quantify the mishandling of AIDS in the 1980s?
- cdcox 13y agoIt's not a direct comparison, but consider the handling of Ebola, where due to simple epidemiological interventions spread has basically been localized and stopped and no outbreak has killed more than 1000 people. Or consider the regular emergence of new flu strains which are far more contagious and are quickly and effectively contained. Though that comparison isn't great because we have a lot of knowledge when it comes to dealing with the flu. My impression is (and I have not studied this) the failure in the HIV epidemic (pandemic?) wasn't a failure to develop drugs, it was a failure to perform basic epidemiological interventions to learn about and slow the progress of the disease.
- tptacek 13y agoIn a sense this is a way of saying that in epidemiology, the failures are noisy and successes are silent, so comparing large epidemics across history might be misleading.
- brazzy 13y agothe comparison makes no sense because the diseases are radically different. Ebola kills so quickly and is so infectious that it is self-limiting: patients die before they can spread it very far. Whereas AIDS patients can spread the disease for years, though it is as weakly infectious as as contagious disease can be.
- enraged_camel 13y agoIn the movie Forrest Gump, there is a scene taking place in the late 70s or early 80s where Jenny is explaining to Forrest that she is ill and the doctors do not know what it is. She dies a few years later. It is never stated explicitly, but the idea is that she was suffering from AIDS, which she contacted during her years as a promiscuous drug addict groupie. In my opinion it is one of the most powerful scenes in the movie, in the sense that it does an amazing job with taking the viewer back to that time period where AIDS was a mystery disease.
- lawn 13y agoWow! I love Forrest Gump and I've seen it a few times at least, but I never realized the connection to AIDS. Thanks.
- asveikau 13y agoI wonder if it's the younger YN crowd that is not seeing the connection? I was pretty young when I saw that movie in 1994, but it never occurred to me that it could be anything other than AIDS; the reference was completely unambiguous. I guess things had changed in the 12 years between the coinage of "AIDS" and that movie, but it still resembled the way people talked about it, and I think the memory of not knowing what it was was still fresh in the culture.
- heywire 13y agoI would have been 13 at that time, and I have the same thoughts. It was very clear to me what it was they were suggesting.
- enraged_camel 13y agoI think it being a movie may have caused people to overlook the reference. I can see how easy it would be to think that Jenny's mystery disease is actually just a made-up plot device to move the story forward, as opposed to a reference to a real disease. I only caught it because my parents are doctors and I happened to be watching it with them - I asked them if she had AIDS and they said that's probably what it was.
- run4yourlives 13y agoAn article like this makes you wonder how many different diseases (answer - over 200) get lumped together under the large "cancer" umbrella. One wonders if we are doing ourselves a disservice maintaining a term more inline with shared symptoms instead of separating the diseases into shared causes. At any rate I'm digressing, but cancer is a fascinating (while horrible) concept that exists in our reality. When you think about it, it is probably more responsible for what we are today than any other force on the planet, in evolutionary terms. As for AIDS: The fact that it was a "gay disease" hampered everything about our response to it. I'd like to think that we would be much more in tune with emerging health threats these days, but somehow I doubt it. I really hope we have HIV licked in a few years though, because Africa really, really needs a vaccine before it can do anything else really.
- GhotiFish 13y agoI always though cancer was an umbrella term for when a cell mutates in such a fashion to lose it's reproductive throttle, and consequently starts consuming as many resources as possible, eventually fragmenting and spreading throughout the body. What kind of cancers don't fit this definition?
- tferraz 13y agoI don't know but the sarcoma the articles says is a symptom present in the last stages of AIDS, when the body is covered with brown "patches" - mostly in the back. Other doctors were investigating other issues at the time, like a strong TB. But it took time for all this different specialists see it was one illness.
- bencollier49 13y agoOh, they all fit this definition, but the mutation isn't always spontaneous. For example, cervical cancer is often caused by HPV, which is why school-age girls are routinely immunised against it in the UK.
- ownagefool 13y ago
- bajsejohannes 13y agoI recommend the movie How To Survive a Plague, which also shows the beginnings of AIDS in New York. Must have been a frightening time. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2124803 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2124803
- kmfrk 13y agoHas anyone found a version of this that works on European DVD players?
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoGet a region-free (or unlockable) DVD player.
- zachlatta 13y agoJust saw that documentary the other night. It really gives a personal edge to the AIDs epidemic.
- acangiano 13y agoWe were here (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1787837/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1787837/) was also very informative and touching.
- bdcravens 13y agoSimilar to early diagnoses of Cystic Fibrosis, where the focus was on symptoms and less on the underlying cause. With CF, it's an issue of NaCl passing through cells, resulting in thick mucus which damages lungs, pancreas, etc. The first cases observed cysts and fibrotic tissues on the pancreas, hence, "Cystic Fibrosis". As there weren't digestive enzymes supplements then to augment the damaged pancreas, patients died of malnutrition. It wasn't until those treatments developed that the lung conditions developed in older patients, which is what CF is known for now. By then, however, the name Cystic Fibrosis had stuck.
- Shank 13y agoThere's a lot of info in the book "The Coming Plague" about the initial reaction to the disease GRID, which would later become AIDS. http://www.amazon.com/The-Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases/dp/0140250913 http://www.amazon.com/The-Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases/dp...
- patrickg_zill 13y agoI cannot find the article by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, which describes how the public health officials in San Francisco bowed to political pressure and did not do the typical contact-tracing, public announcements, etc. that would normally be done - because they feared getting in trouble if they pointed out that the carriers were almost all gays. But it makes an interesting counterpoint to the idea that there was a lack of concern about it.
- decasteve 13y agoSoon after they identified the 4H's of HIV/AIDS: homosexuals, haemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and Haitians.
- aasarava 13y agoHaitians in the US were discriminated against on the belief that they were bringing AIDS into the country. But medical anthropologist Paul Farmer has done a good job of showing that Haitians were only more "susceptible" to the virus than other populations because American sex tourists often visited Haiti and inadvertently spread the disease to Haitian sex workers. http://www.amazon.com/AIDS-Accusation-Haiti-Geography-Blame/dp/0520248392 http://www.amazon.com/AIDS-Accusation-Haiti-Geography-Blame/...
- vilhelm_s 13y agoAs I understood it, there was a long standing debate about whether the AIDS epidemic spread from Haiti to the US or the other way around, but genetic evidence eventually found that it did come from Haiti: http://www.pnas.org/content/104/47/18566.long http://www.pnas.org/content/104/47/18566.long
- caycep 13y agoContrast this from recent papers describing the breathtaking molecular capabilities we have these days with the HIV virus (using inactivated/re-engineered HIV to treat T cell lymphomas/leukemias, bone marrow transplants to treat HIV itself), and it's humbling both - how far we've come, and with HIV still a major killer on the global scene, how far we have to go....
- samspot 13y agoMy vote for the key quote (from the bottom of the article): "Dr. Friedman-Kien said he had tested nine of the victims and found severe defects in their immunological systems. The patients had serious malfunctions of two types of cells called T and B cell lymphocytes, which have important roles in fighting infections and cancer. But Dr. Friedman-Kien emphasized that the researchers did not know whether the immunological defects were the underlying problem or had developed secondarily to the infections or drug use."
- encoderer 13y agoAnd I love that this was at the very bottom of the article! Inverted pyramid... clearly the author thought this to be a somewhat irrelevant aside.
- joezydeco 13y agoIt was scientists working on leukemia and white-cell cancers that made the eventual discovery of HIV-1. Initially, the virus was classified as HTLV-IIIb before getting it's own name. At the time there was also a bit of a dispute between American and French researchers over credit for the discovery and subsequent development of the diagnostic test. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14881-was-robert-gallo-robbed-of-the-nobel-prize.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14881-was-robert-gallo...
- azinman2 13y agoSo sad to read that article especially seeing that they were giving people chemotherapy right away. As if dying from AIDS weren't bad enough. Yet the article did dance around the core problem in talking about a group of promiscuous people, but the connection was not made. I hope medicine has learned better the signs of a viral outbreak.
- jmedwards 13y agoHere's a good article about that particular doctor and the discovery: http://nymag.com/health/features/49240/index4.html http://nymag.com/health/features/49240/index4.html
- rdl 13y ago"There is no national registry of cancer victims, but the nationwide incidence of Kaposi's Sarcoma in the past had been estimated by the Centers for Disease Control to be less than six-one-hundredths of a case per 100,000 people annually, or about two cases in every three million people. However, the disease accounts for up to 9 percent of all cancers in a belt across equatorial Africa, where it commonly affects children and young adults." Is that because GRID already was occurring in Africa, and people getting KS and dying of it, or was it just a common cancer in Africa for unrelated reasons?
- ronaldx 13y agoI wondered the same thing... I collected some thoughts but haven't reached a clear conclusion on that. I tend towards common for unrelated reasons. Kaposi's Sarcoma (KS) is caused by a herpes virus: KSHV, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaposi_sarcoma-associated_herpesvirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaposi_sarcoma-associated_herp... We see KS in HIV patients because they are often concomitant infections and because KS is opportunistic, attacking immune-suppressed people. But, this doesn't mean that KS necessarily goes hand-in-hand with HIV infection. Particular forms of KS affect younger people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_cutaneous_Kaposi_sarcoma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_cutaneous_Kaposi_sarco... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_lymphadenopathic_Kaposi_sarcoma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_lymphadenopathic_Kapos... KS may have been 9% of all cancers in equatorial Africa just because of a very high KSHV prevalence and because lower life expectancy = fewer age-related cancers. There was a similar rate recogised since the 1950s http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200004063421407 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200004063421407 This article also notes that KS now accounts for 50% of tumours in some countries, with and without HIV infection. An NHS article which admits that, even today, they're not exactly sure how many incidents of KS are HIV-related http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Kaposis-sarcoma/Pages/Introduction.aspx http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Kaposis-sarcoma/Pages/Introduct...
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- rootbear 13y agoToday is the 60th birthday of a friend who has been HIV+ since 1983. When we met, ca. 1986, I didn't expect him to live long. I am pleased beyond my ability to express that I was completely wrong. The party he and his husband are throwing on Sunday will be epic.
- mcdoh 13y agoThere's a great Radiolab episode, Patient Zero (http://www.radiolab.org/2011/nov/14/ http://www.radiolab.org/2011/nov/14/), that covers the the spread of AIDS and tracing the disease back to its origin.
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- smegel 13y agoI wonder why they identified it as cancer, and if the chemo had any effect.
- smickie 13y agoScary when it starts to dawn on you what you're reading...