Video: 'The Age of Aids full documentary'

(Friday, June 5, 1981) — The AIDS epidemic officially began today when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report newsletter reported unusual clusters of Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) caused by a form of Pneumocystis carinii (now recognized as a distinct species, Pneumocystis jirovecii) in five homosexual men in Los Angeles.

Over the next 18 months, more PCP clusters were discovered among otherwise healthy men in cities throughout the country, along with other opportunistic diseases (such as Kaposi’s sarcoma and persistent, generalized lymphadenopathy), common in immunosuppressed patients.

By August 1982, the disease was being referred to by its new CDC-coined name: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

The first news article about AIDS appeared May 18, 1981, on page 7 of the New York Native, a gay bi-weekly newspaper, under the headline “Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded.”

Larry Mass, a physician and contributor to the Native, had been alerted to an increase in reported cases of pneumocystis pneumonia among gay men, and broke the news of “an exotic new disease” two weeks before it was officially announced in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.