#PrideFacts2026 Day 5

On June 5, 1981, the CDC issued a notice about 5 men in the US who had a rare form of pneumonia. This is the first official notice of the disease that had not yet been named AIDS.

Initially seen as a disease that only affected gay men, governments were slow to respond. The CDC initially did a lot of work with almost no funding dedicated to specific research or interventions. Within a few years HIV was identified as the cause. However, a coordinated effort to deal with the pandemic did not start until the latter half of the 1980s. The labelling of this as a “gay disease” is most of the reason for this.

Some people believe that HIV made the jump from primates to humans in the early 1900s. Genetic testing of HIV-1 M can trace the virus in humans back to 1910. Looking back, the first well-documented case of HIV/AIDS is from 1959 in Congo. In the United States, the disease can be traced back to at least 1966.

The stigma and prejudice around AIDS is hard to overstate. This caused — and continues to cause — problems with people receiving the care they need. It’s also possible to trace the roots of the disease in Africa to the rise of European colonialism there, with the radical changes it brought to the continent. The book And the Bank Played On by Randy Shilts is a difficult to read but thorough, contemporary account of a lot of what happened.

(There’s also a book with the same title, by Christopher Ward, which — while a great book, too — is about the Titanic. Get the wrong one and you will be confused)

#Pride #Pride2026 #PrideMonth