A brief history of HIV and AIDS

Twenty-five years ago AIDS was unknown. HIV was around, and people were getting sick and dying because of it. But nobody knew about the virus we now call HIV, or the disease we now call AIDS.

In his book, And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts explains how many early cases of AIDS were traced to Canadian Gaetan Dugas. Doctors studying the spread of AIDS in the early 1980s called Dugas, “patient zero.”

But AIDS did not start with Dugas, and he was not the first person to become infected with HIV. Researchers now think HIV has been around since the 1940s, perhaps as far back as 1900. What has changed is the rapid spread of the disease beginning in the 1980s.