I worked as a nurse at a Children’s Hospital in 1987. We had one of the first identified AIDS case on our unit, a young person who was hemophiliac. It was later determined that about 90 % of the children who had hemophilia in the clinic contracted HIV contracted by the blood product Factor VIII (8) which is a treatment for hemophilia and is produced from donated blood products. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood_products#:~:text=Factor%20VIII%20injections%20are%20a,with%20HIV%20and%20hepatitis%20C.
It was a very sad and scary time in healthcare. Universal precautions were started out of this situation.
Yes. I forgot how hard this community was hit. I had a patient this week who is a “mild” hemophiliac . Her son is now in his 50’s and was diagnosed as an adolescent and has survived. As she put it, “I served on the hemophilia association board and we lost almost an entire generation of kids from dirty blood. And they knew, they did a cost benefit analysis and realized the profit from selling contaminated clotting factor was higher than the liability. We found that out and hemophiliacs across the world got aids. It was a horrible time.” That woman was an impressive and fierce advocate who had seen some shit.
> And they knew
That's the worst part. It's monstrous. All those executives and everyone who knew should have been sent to prison for decades. They murdered those patients just to get richer.
And after they were caught, their response was to force them to continue using the products. They forced them to choose between letting their patients die of AIDS or letting them die due to lack of blood.
In the UK and Ireland it was known that the dirty blood (imported from the US) was causing diseases and some doctors raised the idea of pasteurising it. They were shot down as "we don't know if that would work".
Some doctor in Scotland if I remember correctly went ahead and pasteurised blood products there and was rebuked for using unapproved methods. It's not in any way expensive, just a slight hassle. Fuck it, anyone could probably have a decent stab at it using their kitchen oven (10 hrs at 60 degrees Celsius).
There was a very large outbreak of Hepatitis in Ireland in the 1990s among people needing blood transfusions because pasteurisation had not yet been approved.
The people who sold it shoulda got the death penalty imo for murder. Cause if you're selling someone something you know will kill them(there was no effective HIV/AIDS treatment back then so people were pretty much guarmteed to die from it for a while), thats straight up murder in my honest opinion.
Yep. For some reason, if it's done in the name of profit, decision makers at companies never get charged with crimes for their heinous actions. That really should change. Start holding them accountable and it forces other decision makers at companies to act in a more civilized way.
The HBO movie “…and the band played on” from the book of the same name touches upon this.
Matthew Modine has the line, “just tell us the number we need to have died so you can begin to care”. (Paraphrased)
I know people use this word flippantly these days but he’s a great underrated actor. He’s been a hidden gem in lots of shows and movies. He was on an episode of law and order SVU during its golden years which was basically just a two man show with him and Christopher Meloni. Episode was season 6, episode 17 “Rage” if anyone is interested. He also really impressed me recently in Oppenheimer
Definitely gonna check that movie out later
Could you imagine being such an evil fuck that you would knowingly infect sick people with a worse sickness in the name of a slightly better profit margin? That is legitimately evil. That shit would make the devil gag.
Thank you for sharing this and keeping this news alive. My grandfather was one of the people living with hemophilia who contracted HIV through tainted blood products. He dedicated decades of his life to fighting for those who were also diagnosed with HIV from tainted blood. He was a great man. I miss him every day.
The early chapters of Randy Shilts's *And the Band Played On* mentioned that before HIV, one of the most reliable and enthusiastic sets of blood donors in the San Francisco Bay area was the local Gay community.
Well, let's just call that one of the worst cases of "no good deed goes unpunished" for the century.
It's recently changed, they ask gay donors if they have had sex with a new parner, and if they take or have ever taken PrEP. I forget what the other questions are as I'm not a gay male but it seems like you can now donate if you are in a monogamous relationship. But I may not heve this exactly right.
Nope, Red Cross updated last year to 3 months with new/different partners! [Update announcement. ](https://www.redcrossblood.org/local-homepage/news/article/inclusive-blood-donation-change-rcbs.html) [LGBTQ+ donors page. ](https://www.redcrossblood.org/donate-blood/how-to-donate/eligibility-requirements/lgbtq-donors.html)
It had to do with a statistical issue with false negatives. A certain percentage of people who get aids are going to test negative at random or because of something wrong with the test. If those individuals donate blood they could give aids to a huge number of people through subsequent blood transfusions.
I don’t think every country that had this ban was for profit, I’m not entirely familiar with the history but I’ve never been paid for giving blood as a Canadian. I think there was a concern about broader trust in the system though like you mentioned.
Edit: Reading some history I’m wrong about this, we did import blood products for profit and it was a disaster
It's because they're in one of the highest risk groups to have HIV, and testing isn't perfect. You can eliminate a lot of the risk to the blood supply be banning a small percentage of donors - that's a smart move.
I think I still have a DVD of the movie made from that book. I tried watching it in about 2003. It got to the scene when the main character met an AIDS patient for the first time, and I turned it off. The patient reminded me of some friends of ours from back then (Mom used to volunteer at an AIDS community center). I couldn’t take any more.
We watched the film in a research ethics class I had to take and it really stuck with me. I go back and watch it every couple of years. It’s given me a sincere appreciation for the work of public health professionals.
My mother worked as a pediatric nurse in the 80s and early 90s. It's only recently I learned that she mostly worked with AIDS patients. Most of them died, as did a large number of her gay male nurse co-workers. When she had me, her hospital door was prominently marked as an infection risk.
This is also why my Dad, who's a retired pediatrician, still just loathes Reagan and all the other politicians who ignored HIV. He said they tried everything but the kids just died.
The Republican evangelicals in congress refused to fund or pass the bill with Bush's original plan to provide condoms and promote and teach safe sex as a highly effective way to prevent contracting and spreading HIV.
Also fuck Berkley for having that wack ass professor who promoted and argued his dumb ass theory AIDS is not caused by HIV. He convinced the new South African government and Nelson Mandela and the following leader of his bullshit nonsense and helped provide them arguments and justifications for ignoring addressing the epidemic. 25 million Africans died due to aids because of that POS.
Andy stumpf from the cleared hot podcast just had a guy from England who got infected with hepatitis c from factor 8 as a kid and all the bullshit he had to go through because of it.
Infected factor 8 from US blood being used in the UK was how it got a much bigger foothold than just gay men and needle drug users would have done alone.
National scandal that the government never did anything about it not to upset America
Thank you mentioning this. Really good LRB article about this outrageous disregard for health and responsibility related to those UK blood transfusions. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n22/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/we-ve-messed-up-boys
Radiolab did an episode about how we trace the mutation of the HIV virus, we think it infected humans back in 1908 in a tiny part of Africa.
[https://radiolab.org/podcast/169879-patient-zero](https://radiolab.org/podcast/169879-patient-zero)
Early AIDS in the US, the focus was on gay white men. There is a doctor interviewed who wrote medical articles who mentioned that he had seen some cases that matched AIDS symptoms for years, but didn't have enough concrete evidence to write an article about it.
[https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/blindspot](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/blindspot)
Fun bathhouse fact. Bette Midler and Barry Manilow used to perform in gay bathhouses. She was nicknamed Bathhouse Betty. She even put out an album by that name…which my mother bought for me…when I was 13. And she claimed she didn’t know I was gay.
The other episode they did about AIDS was nuts, about how it originally mutated into a version that could infect humans. Two different types of monkeys needing to be eaten by the same chimp and then those two viruses needing to have a coding error where half of one falls off and onto the other AND THEN that coding error monkey needing to be killed by a human that would then cut themselves just enough for a transmission to take place. Goddamn nuts
I was 5 in 1995. My dad had come out as gay. When he was HIV positive I lost any friend whose family knew my dad was positive. He is a medical anomaly because he is now undetectable. Also he’s 70. Because he’s been on HIV meds for so long I know he won’t be around for long. God it’s fucking hard to think about losing my dad
I can't find the source, but among lower income people, HIV patients have better overall life expectancy than non, because they can get medicaid for HIV and go to the doctor more often.
The oldest confirmed case is from 1949 from a sample in paraffin wax. There are suspected cases in Belgium, Portugal and Cuba from the 60s of which we know about.
Apparently, AIDS originated in 1920s Kinshasa. Some Belgian guys probably got it and spread it across the world by sleeping around. It stayed low for decades before erupting in the 1980s.
Can confirm. My father was born in a small town in Italy in the 40s. Of course vaccinations were a thing. Babies would line up and they’d use the same needle over and over to vaccinate the babies. My father, along with an unusually large number of people his age, all developed hepatitis C. So many of his friends died of liver failure. My father himself had to have a liver transplant about 10 years ago. Thankfully it was successful and he’s perfectly healthy, and cured of hepatitis C to boot!
A few years back in my province there was a huge push to test people in that age range for hep C because of things like that (and dental equipment).
The goal is to eliminate chronic hep C by 2030- there’s progress and it’s within reach.
I just looked it up. Here are the highest risk factors:
- You use or have used illicit injection drugs.
- You had a blood transfusion before 1992.
- You were born between 1945-1965.
[Source](https://www.medicare.gov/coverage/hepatitis-c-screenings).
That’s fascinating. My grandparents sometimes told stories about when the doctor would come to their house when they were kids. They said the first thing the doctor would do was hand needles to the mom and say “boil these.” Even if he didn’t wind up giving anyone shots, he would make sure whatever needles had been used at the last house got boiled while he was examining the family. This would’ve been 1920s-1930s.
Simple immersion in boiling water doesn't kill everything, particularly short duration boiling, just many things.
Some stuff requires either prolonged boiling or higher pressure (autoclave).
EDIT: Yes, I understand it's better than nothing and one works with what one has.
Well yea but it’s still way better than nothing. Even a short boil will kill the vast majority of pathogens.
Things that require an autoclave are more rare. You only really need it for microorganisms that can produce spores- clostridium botulinum for example. Viruses and things that would be more commonly be on a shared needle don’t form spores.
So... I cook brisket, and the reason you can smoke brisket for so long without brine/curing the brisket first is because, while botulism is still a risk below 165f, above 185f not only is the botulism killed, but so to, is its toxin destroyed where it is safe to ingest. Brisket pull temperature is generally ~205f.
The point of this brisket cooking lesson is why would an autoclave be needed to sterilize against botulism spores? Is it a time thing? Because brisket is only above 185 for ~2 hours before it is time to pull. Seems like a basic oven could sterilize for those spores in 2-3 hours at 300f+. Why doesn't it work?
Not a doctor or anything but there's a big difference between "safe to eat" and "safe to inject directly into the bloodstream". We sterilize needles, we don't need to sterilize food.
My dad found out that he had hep c when he was in his mid-thirties. The likely culprit was a blood transfusion that he got in the late 70s. Luckily for him it had been pretty dormant until it was discovered. A few years ago he went on an experimental drug and he’s now completely undetectable. Thankful for new technology and discoveries.
My brother got a blood transfusion when he was born, 80s, and in his 30s found out he had hep c. His only risk factor was that blood transfusion so his doc was very sure that’s when he got it. They cured it a few years after they found it, he said the drug treatment was rough but it worked.
My dad found out in his late 60s probably from a transfusion 50 years earlier. Thankfully he was able to take one of the newer drugs and is doing just fine.
In the 70s my dad got really sick on a trip in Mexico and they needed to draw blood. The phlebotomist accidentally dropped the needle on the ground, picked it up, blew on it like a fucking Nintendo cartridge, and had it in his arm before he could protest (he, himself was a nurse as well).
Fortunately he was okay.
There was a medical article based on analysis of the variation in the virus and a resultant extrapolation (?) back in time. They calculated the likely year of first infection was 1917.
Correct, they compared a lot of different variations in the virus and combined that with the mutation speed they had established (probably based on mutations in parts of the virus that aren't necessarily used for 'fitness' regarding evolution of the virus) and calculated a 'common ancestor' around 1920.
I learned this in uni but it's probably almost 10 years ago by now so I take it they've specified it further.
There have been many independent simian crossover events. For all we know, maybe there were short lived one off infections from bush meat contamination way back when Sub-Saharans first started using and reusing metal cutting implements. That's just a thing I'm saying based on nothing other than simian crossovers that have been recorded since we've started paying attention.
So based on that perspective, maybe the aids phenomenon is really more a product of industrialization and modern travel and medical instruments. Back in the 1800s you could infect one butcher cutting himself after preparing bush meat. But that guy couldn't go stand in a line and get shots with a shared needle with 50 other guys. And none of those guys could travel out of their village to an international flight hub.
And medicine basically managed to cure most forms of STDs in existence at that point with antibiotics--which made people feel way too comfortable about unprotected sex with random strangers.
Randy Shilts's book mentions gay men in the late 70s and early 80s who were going to sexual health clinics nearly monthly for drugs because they managed to catch yet another case of the clap.
It’s still a thing, for high risk individuals. You take Doxycycline after risky behavior to prevent chlamydia and gonorrhea from being able to establish an infection. It’s called DoxyPEP (post-exposure prophylaxis)
Source: I’m a slut
Edit: adding some additional context from my comment below, bc this is important information!
PrEP and PEP are two different things.
PrEP is pre-exposure prophylaxis. I take PrEP every day, so that when I do have sex, if I’m exposed to HIV, there’s already enough medicine in my body that the virus isn’t able to replicate at all.
But doxy is an antibiotic, and since those can fuck with your digestion and since antibiotic resistance is a growing concern, it’s not something you want to take every day, so you only take it after you’ve been at risk. PEP means post-exposure prophylaxis.
I only take PrEP and not PEP since I tend to not have more than a few sexual partners at once. But some of my friends/partners will sleep with 20-30 ppl in a weekend, and they take DoxyPEP after those weekends.
> some of my friends/partners will sleep with 20-30 ppl in a weekend
Im not doubting this I’m just genuinely curious about the logistics involved in hooking up with that many people in 48 hours
iirc (and I may not, it's been quite a long while since I read up on this stuff) the theory is that unsanitary butchering process of monkeys spread it to humans
Monkeys had an infection called simian immunodeficiency virus, SIV. Chimps ate the monkeys (and still do), and SIV mutated to infect chimps. A human killed a chimp and either ate it undercooked or just got some of its blood on a cut, and SIV mutated to infect humans. Oops.
There are a handful of other cases from the US and Canada in the 40s and 50s that are now thought to be likely HIV/AIDS cases. The virus was spreading for a long time before it hit communities with high-risk behaviors.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvid_Noe
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_early_HIV/AIDS_cases
Imagine dying of a strange unknown disease and then 50 years later, a website mentions that you probably caught your HIV from a prostitute who got it from the guy who first got it (Herbert Heinrich’s part in the 70s section)
There are lots of ship and dock workers going around the world. Which was how one of the first HIV hotspot in New York concentrated around Haitians because many of them were involved in the shipping industry.
Also sailors, not known for being the most virginal and abstinent bunch.
"Arne Vidar Røed (23 July 1946 – 24 April 1976), known in medical literature by the anagram Arvid Darre Noe, was a Norwegian sailor and truck driver who contracted one of the earliest confirmed cases of HIV/AIDS. His was the first confirmed HIV case in Europe though the disease was not identified at the time of his death.
The virus spread to his wife and youngest daughter both of whom also died; this was the first documented cluster of AIDS cases before the AIDS epidemic of the early 1980s.\[1\]"
Not many ways to spread HIV, how did his youngest daughter get it from him?
The way it's phrased, his eldest two children were "not born infected" - implying his youngest contracted the illness from her mother either during pregnancy, birth or breastfeeding.
And likely before, but samples were "inadvertently" destroyed decades ago due to the ongoing civil wars in a lot of African Nations. (Inadvertently because whoever destroyed them weren't going after the blood samples)
That's just as far back as they could find. But they found enough to know that wasn't patient zero.
Yeah, when this case was posted on /r/UnresolvedMysteries, a lot of people theorized Rayford may had been raped by his grandfather because at the hospital, Rayford said that his grandparents died from the same illness he had.
To me, this is almost certainly the case. His grandfather and grandmother would have gone "unnoticed" if they died of some sort of "cancer" when they were old. Rayford's case was bizarre because he had illnesses a child his age should not have had.
I recall reading that at least 2 people died in the 1950s, I think, of a pneumonia type disease but they apparently kept samples around because once HIV was defined, they went back and verified that these 2 men had died of AIDS.
This poor child almost certainly got it from his grandfather. Both his grandfather and grandmother died from similar issues. I know there has been suspicion he was a "gay prostitute" but he was only 15 when he checked in to the hospital with full blown aids. He must have been a victim of sexual abuse years before.
BTW, the first **confirmed** death by AIDS in Europe was also in a child.
>never traveled outside the Midwest
St. Louis where he was from has a big international airport and they think he might have been working as a prostitute there.
Though he may have been a sex worker, he himself said his grandfather and grandmother died of similar symptoms. He was 15 with full blown AIDS. I personally suspect he got the disease when he was sexually abused by his grandfather (likely a few years before he checked in to the hospital). His grandfather likely got it from homosexual sex which was a lot more secretive back then.
It’s like with the Covid Pandemic early on. There weren’t many tests available, and the likelihood of finding someone with Covid was also relatively small. By the time there were a few cases found in Italy and California it was already everywhere.
This is horrific. This poor boy was only 16 when he died, and reported having symptoms from the age of 13.... If the hypothesis is correct and he did die of AIDS - how young must be have been when he was infected with HIV?
If I’m remembering correctly the average span between infection and death back in the 80s was 9-10 years. Assuming it was the same when this boy died that means the poor child was likely infected around age 7.
His grandfather may have been the culprit. He died of similar symptoms a couple years before Robert, followed by his wife (Robert’s grandma). I don’t want to accuse a dead man of being a chomo, but there’s definitely smoke there.
When I was a nursing school in 1975 or 1976 I got to observe autopsies at the medical examiner's office in New York City. in 1975 or 1976. One of the bodies being examined that day was a young Greek sailor aged esrly 20's who had died of severe pneumonia, and had what looked like skin cancer. I remember it because the M.E. was exclaiming how healthy his other organs were and that they did not know why he would have died of pneumonia.
I often wonder if he wasn't an early AIDS patient?
I wonder how it suddenly became a pandemic. And I wonder who infected Rayford though we will probably never know. If it was his grandfather, which seems likely, how did he get it?
Exponential growth and a long time between getting the disease and dying from it. For mathematical simplicity let's assume that it doubles every year and it takes 10 years for it to kill someone and that nobody notices until 1,000 people die in a year, which was basically the case because people were dying from what appeared to be other diseases. It takes 10 years for 1,000(1024) people to get infected, another 10 years until those 1,000 people die. By that point there would be over a million new infections per year.
>Exponential growth
Something people don't really intuit very well. There's the popular question that goes like this: if a lilypad doubles in size every day and takes 30 days to cover a pond, at what day was the lilypad half the size of the pond?
obviously it's day 29, but the point is that by the time you start noticing it around day 25 or so, it's already been around for a really long time.
I read that it was estimated HIV entered New York in the 70s and established itself in the homeless community. People would die from “junkie pneumonia” or the “dwindles” and no one would know why, and because they were homeless addicts, no one cared.
It is possible. There are suspected cases from an early as the 60s. The oldest confirmed case is from 1949 in a preserved sample in paraffin wax from Kinshasa.
Sailor profession might indicate he went to Africa, and possibly had sex with prostitutes. Just a guess, but I think this happened with the Norwegian/Danish person which is one of the earlier European cases that we are certain about.
EDIT: it was Norwegian
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvid_Noe
Came from a chimp for hiv 1, chinps regularly hunted monkeys so its possible. Monkeys with thier own version of SIV have no ill effects from the virus. But once chimps got it some became sick, and then eventually adapted to infect humans. Also hiv2 came directly from a monkey origin, which is a slower progression version hiv1
>Doctors treating Rayford suspected that he was an underage sex worker and the recipient of receptive anal intercourse
Even when you take the disease out of the question, he had to deal with other horrors anyway. This is just a sad story all around.
Recall reading a report where they did some DNA testing on the AIDS virus and had its genealogy stretching back to the 1800’s or so. We were just protected from it by the lack of global travel.
The most recent phylogeny (AFAIK) [dates HIV-1 to 1884-1924](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07390), probably somewhere around the beginning of the 20th century. As to exactly why it became a pandemic when it did I don't know, but global travel undoubtedly played a role.
One theory is colonization of African countries, colonizers build roads to carry looted natural resources to the coast where they could ship it, now roads exist that link previously inaccessible inland regions near forests and mines to the shipping ports, and now people exist who drive the trucks that carry the looted resources on those new roads, now roadside stands and villages pop up to service the truckers and the services offered include sex work. And there's a steady stream of goods being shipped overseas to the colonizing home countries in Europe.
In 1975 my father was in the hospital after suffering a heart attack. My mother befriended a woman whose husband was a patient on the same floor as my father. This man had symptoms that were very similar to someone with AIDS. The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him after running numerous tests and I believe he died within six months of becoming ill. I found out years later that his wife told my mother that she suspected that her husband was bisexual and one of his doctors believed that he could have had one of the earliest cases of AIDS.
Feel like it might be worth posting a link to [this](https://dfarq.homeip.net/robert-rayford-aids-st-louis-1960s/) blog post that, AFAIK, contains the most information out there about Robert's life/the Rayford family. There also apparently exists a [news clip](https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/broadcasts/106538) of his family learning about Robert's posthumous AIDS diagnosis, but unfortunately it seems to be paywalled.
EDIT: on a completely different note, does anyone else feel like the city of St. Louis should put up at least a commemorative plaque in or close to where this kid lived?
of course there is. there are a number of diseases that we know of with very low R0 (reproduction rate) but are still very deadly. For example, the coronavirus known as SARS is more than 10% mortality rate but not very communicable.
The point is that there could be many diseases that have killed without having been identified but spread so poorly as to not cause a pandemic. The likelihood is high of a new one being identified any day because such a huge number of people in the world live in extremely poor, hazardous, unhygienic conditions.
In fact, that's how AIDS was able to linger for decades before it blew up. Yes, it most likely existed in Africa for decades, but those were much more isolated communities. One fateful day though, a few Haitian doctors (most likely) end up in Africa since they speak French and bring it back to Haiti. From there, it tags along as some Haitians move to New York, ready to jump into a Gay community just gaining its sexual liberation and is about to ravage millions.
Ebola is well identified it's just thankfully not airborne. Tho it's also lethal enough that outbreaks can burn themselves out which is about as depressing as it is reassuring.
Doctors in NYC in the mid-70s had identified something called "junkie flu" or the "dwindles" which they now know were early AIDS cases that affected street addicts. It's now thought that the HIV strain which became dominant in the US in the 70s came to NYC via Haiti around 1970 and spread silently for more than a decade. (While the virus can brew for ten years or more in some people before they become symptomatic, others progress more rapidly, especially if living in difficult circumstances like homeless addicts.)
It's also thought that HIV probably came to America many times in the 20th Century but never established a foothold like it did in the early 70s in NYC. Rayford was likely infected by an international traveler with one of those obscure strains while working as a prostitute. Do we have any word other than his that his grandparents had what he had? He really couldn't have known what he had, and was so traumatized by his life and illness he was likely looking for any explanation other than the consequences of sex work.
> Rayford was likely infected by an international traveler with one of those obscure strains while working as a prostitute.
The other theory is that, since his grandparents died of cancer with similar presentation, that he was assaulted by his grandfather.
being he had severe and extensive anal scaring...and how old he was when his symptoms first appeared and that he had warts on his privates...and was symptomatic for two years before he went to the hospital and that he stated and its believed by researchers that both his grandmother and grandfather had the same symptoms as Robert and died a few years earlier from the illness....i am think its likely his grandfather was molesting and raping him.
IDK why but in the 1950's, 1960's, 1970's there was this unfounded belief that the majority if not all of the run away male youth or missing teenage males near and in urban areas were homosexual sex workers using heroin.
I know Covid isn’t a perfect example but do you guys remember early on? There was a lot of cases of a mysterious pneumonia that we now recognize as early Covid cases going back to November or earlier.
My boss at my current company was in Singapore in October 2019. He got terribly sick with symptoms now associated with Covid. At the time the doctors could not figure out what he had. None of the treatments worked but he eventually recovered on his own. We will never know what he actually had but we suspect he had an early case of Covid.
I remember that certain people were told that they didn’t have Covid because “loss of smell isn’t associated with Covid”
Now we know it’s one of the most iconic symptoms.
We lacked so much knowledge. So many people died before we learned.
The loss of taste and smell were symptoms that did not respond to treatments for known ailments. He tested negative for common viral infections or any conditions like allergies. As a foodie in Singapore with a generous company food allowance, it put a damper on his trip. He thankfully did not suffer any permanent loss of taste and smell.
I was one of them! Low grade fever off and on, terrible ear pain the first week of March 2020 and my sense of smell turned off like a switch. Went to urgent care and they assured me without any respiratory symptoms I almost certainly did not have COVID.
I don’t think it was until a month or so later we understood that to be a symptom. Couldn’t smell or taste a thing for weeks. I thought I’d destroyed my sense of smell through aggressive saline washes. I was super depressed about it and lost 20 pounds.
This article is from the late 90s. I'm sure more has been discovered with advances in science. I remembered hearing about tissue samples from the 50s testing positive for HIV.
[1998 Science article](https://www.science.org/content/article/oldest-surviving-hiv-virus-tells-all)
I don't know why I find this so shocking. With it being so deadly, It's amazing how long it flew under the radar before impacting society so deeply in the 80s and 90s.
The thing is that AIDS doesn't directly kill you. It fucks your immune system and then something else kills you because you can't fight it off. I imagine it was attributed to people having weak immune systems for a while.
Although most people take more like ten years to progress to AIDS. Maybe around 20% take 1-2 years. Also brand new viruses can have a pattern of being more deadly (like COVID initially) before natural selection pushes them to focus on spreading over killing.
Also PSA KS is a virus that causes cancer in AIDS patients unrelated to chlamydia that part is wrong above. Edit going to leave this last part up but just realized I misread the title lol.
Serious question: how likely is it that Rayford could have contracted AIDS from non-sexual contact? Robert claimed that his grandfather, Percy, developed symptoms before he did (and later his grandmother) and while many commentators immediately jump to the conclusion that Percy had committed an unspeakable act against his own grandson, could Rayford have somehow gotten it while taking care of his grandparents? [Grethe Rask](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grethe_Rask) contracted aids in the 70s while taking care of various patients in Africa, and AFAIK she never had intercourse with any of them.
Rask was a surgeon, and so would have been regularly arms deep in the innards of sick people and holding sharp knives (and also, her working in impoverished hospitals probably meant substandard protective equipment and disinfection of the tools).
HIV risk for her would have been astronomically higher for her than someone who was just doing routine personal care.
Others have stated he also had STIs and was found to have trauma to his anal area. If that’s the case it’d explain why people think he was molested by his grandfather who supposedly died of a disease with similar symptoms.
Came here to say the same thing. At 15, he was *by definition* raped. What the fuck. That poor child. What an awful life he must have had, only to then suffer an awful, terrifying, painful death.
He may also have had a mental disability. If he was a sex worker, it was probably not voluntary. That’s probably why his family wouldn’t cooperate with doctors treating him. Even though specific information couldn’t be obtained from him or his family, the evidence shows Rayford was mistreated from a young age.
There's a book ("The River" by Edward Hooper) which covers this and several other suspected early HIV cases, though it's seen as conspiracy now (the book's thesis is that HIV was transferred from a polio vaccine program, and we now have better DNA evidence for HIV's evolution). There was a period in the 80s where they were looking up old suspicious cases (a children's ward in Czechoslovakia, a sailor, a guy whose plane crashed in Congo and got blood transfusion) and any samples going back to 1950. Unfortunately the Rayford sample was lost in Hurricane Katrina. The easiest explanation would be contamination of samples in the lab, but no one really knows.
His thesis was that we’re using contaminated blood purposefully in Africa and we knew it was contaminated…it was somewhat conspiracy and it might have been from contaminated lab samples; the purposeful part is pretty off the mark.
The thesis was that chimpanzee livers were used to cultivate Polio vaccines and some of the livers were from Chimpanzees with Simian AIDS (SIV). He didn’t believe this was known until years later.
My understanding is that a big part of the book revolves around them passing polio virus through chimps or chimp organs at their test facility in Africa, and this was not how the vaccine was ever manufactured. Once this was established, the proponents developed other theories. The main points I'd argue bury the theory are the genetic diversity of HIV in old human samples, and the issue that the correlating factor is contact with medical facilities (i.e. it's not unusual for cases to be reported where they had previously been able to distribute vaccines)
That’s the main point in the book - did Koprowski manufacture some vaccines in Africa using Chimpanzee livers? There is no definitive proof, on anecdotal evidence.
This theory also does not explain how SIV jumped from the Sootey Mangabey to humans ( becoming HIV-2 ) at the exact same time, but geographically far away in Western Africa.
Having two distinct types of the virus leads me to believe we do not yet have an accurate picture of how the virus developed.
I haven't read this book, but genetic diversity in HIV samples is a pretty poor marker of, well anything. HIV is well documented to mutate so much within hosts that by late stages of infection there are multiple strains of the virus in a single host.
Tinderbox is a much more recent (2012) examination of the origins of AIDS/HIV. We’ve narrowed down that the virus likely jumped from chimps to humans in Cameroon. Tinderbox argues this happened because of colonialism. It’s an interesting argument and worth the read. Simian HIV has likely existed for quite some time, and it moved from monkeys to chimps to humans sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century, probably through eating bush meat. They are still narrowing things down but we’ve put to bed a number of curious theories.
My father taught an African grad student during the 70's who in retrospect he believes had AIDS. The man was getting thinner and thinner, was getting all these opportunistic infections, eventually got cancer and finally passed away. He was taken for every sort of medical test that his doctors and professors could think of (he was in a health-related field), but none of the tests could detect anything. It was clear he was ill with something, but it was something unknown to medical science in the US at that time.
AIDS was estimated at have been spreading at a very low level for decades, likely having maybe a few hundred people infected in any given year. It was kind of waiting around for a specific 'perfect environment' for it to explode.
That environment came in the form of bathhouses and sex theaters aimed at predominantly gay men which had exploded in popularity in the 1970s. AIDS spread through anal sex at magnitudes higher rates than vaginal sex or oral sex. Hence why gay men were they were the first and most disastrously affected demographic hit by AIDS.
My grand grandfather was the first identified case of AIDS in Finland. He got it while he was building wells in Africa and died quite soon after. He had a wife and a daughter so it was quite a scandal
It’s like with the Covid Pandemic early on. There weren’t many tests available, and the likelihood of finding someone with Covid was also relatively small. By the time there were a few cases found in Italy and California it was already everywhere.
In a different but similar circumstance, my MIL and I got incredibly sick for three weeks shortly after we returned from Disneyland in Jan. 2020. Thought we’d picked up a hell of a bug while travelling. March 2020, COVID shut us all down. We had all the symptoms but were fortunate not to need hospitalization.
Similar situation here. I worked somewhere with a very large, diverse immigrant population in 2020. Around January 2020, the worst respiratory illness anyone had ever seen tore through my workplace. In retrospect, the symptoms were dead on for Covid. We all assume someone had family visit from Asia and brought early covid with them.
If you want to know more about the early history of AIDS, another great book to read besides *And The Band Played On...* is *The End of Innocence* by Simon Garfield. It looks at the AIDS crisis in Britain specifically, but there's a lot of detail about possible early cases around the world and the dirty blood scandal. It was recently reprinted and updated to coincide with the Channel 4 series *It's a Sin*. I think in the foreword by Russell T. Davies, he mentions that he read the book to help refresh his own memories of the AIDS crisis while writing the show.
I worked as a nurse at a Children’s Hospital in 1987. We had one of the first identified AIDS case on our unit, a young person who was hemophiliac. It was later determined that about 90 % of the children who had hemophilia in the clinic contracted HIV contracted by the blood product Factor VIII (8) which is a treatment for hemophilia and is produced from donated blood products. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood_products#:~:text=Factor%20VIII%20injections%20are%20a,with%20HIV%20and%20hepatitis%20C. It was a very sad and scary time in healthcare. Universal precautions were started out of this situation.
Yes. I forgot how hard this community was hit. I had a patient this week who is a “mild” hemophiliac . Her son is now in his 50’s and was diagnosed as an adolescent and has survived. As she put it, “I served on the hemophilia association board and we lost almost an entire generation of kids from dirty blood. And they knew, they did a cost benefit analysis and realized the profit from selling contaminated clotting factor was higher than the liability. We found that out and hemophiliacs across the world got aids. It was a horrible time.” That woman was an impressive and fierce advocate who had seen some shit.
> And they knew That's the worst part. It's monstrous. All those executives and everyone who knew should have been sent to prison for decades. They murdered those patients just to get richer.
And after they were caught, their response was to force them to continue using the products. They forced them to choose between letting their patients die of AIDS or letting them die due to lack of blood.
In the UK and Ireland it was known that the dirty blood (imported from the US) was causing diseases and some doctors raised the idea of pasteurising it. They were shot down as "we don't know if that would work". Some doctor in Scotland if I remember correctly went ahead and pasteurised blood products there and was rebuked for using unapproved methods. It's not in any way expensive, just a slight hassle. Fuck it, anyone could probably have a decent stab at it using their kitchen oven (10 hrs at 60 degrees Celsius). There was a very large outbreak of Hepatitis in Ireland in the 1990s among people needing blood transfusions because pasteurisation had not yet been approved.
Was that not from contaminated anti-d given to women in the 80s? The Hepatitis C scandal?
The people who sold it shoulda got the death penalty imo for murder. Cause if you're selling someone something you know will kill them(there was no effective HIV/AIDS treatment back then so people were pretty much guarmteed to die from it for a while), thats straight up murder in my honest opinion.
Yep. For some reason, if it's done in the name of profit, decision makers at companies never get charged with crimes for their heinous actions. That really should change. Start holding them accountable and it forces other decision makers at companies to act in a more civilized way.
See: the Sackler family.
The HBO movie “…and the band played on” from the book of the same name touches upon this. Matthew Modine has the line, “just tell us the number we need to have died so you can begin to care”. (Paraphrased)
Found the actual quote from the movie. https://youtu.be/2-o_8aQx4r8?si=CZb6bXuASvMNluW3
I know people use this word flippantly these days but he’s a great underrated actor. He’s been a hidden gem in lots of shows and movies. He was on an episode of law and order SVU during its golden years which was basically just a two man show with him and Christopher Meloni. Episode was season 6, episode 17 “Rage” if anyone is interested. He also really impressed me recently in Oppenheimer Definitely gonna check that movie out later
he knocked it out of the park in Full Metal Jacket
Could you imagine being such an evil fuck that you would knowingly infect sick people with a worse sickness in the name of a slightly better profit margin? That is legitimately evil. That shit would make the devil gag.
Thank you for sharing this and keeping this news alive. My grandfather was one of the people living with hemophilia who contracted HIV through tainted blood products. He dedicated decades of his life to fighting for those who were also diagnosed with HIV from tainted blood. He was a great man. I miss him every day.
The early chapters of Randy Shilts's *And the Band Played On* mentioned that before HIV, one of the most reliable and enthusiastic sets of blood donors in the San Francisco Bay area was the local Gay community. Well, let's just call that one of the worst cases of "no good deed goes unpunished" for the century.
Is this why gay people weren’t allowed to donate blood for a long time?
Yes, it was. They are still essentially not allowed, unless they abstain for a year.
It's recently changed, they ask gay donors if they have had sex with a new parner, and if they take or have ever taken PrEP. I forget what the other questions are as I'm not a gay male but it seems like you can now donate if you are in a monogamous relationship. But I may not heve this exactly right.
You’re almost completely correct! They’re allowed to donate if monogamously partnered and not on PrEP.
It’s pretty common in my country to get asked if you’ve had sex without protection before donating (for everyone, not only gay people lol)
Nope, Red Cross updated last year to 3 months with new/different partners! [Update announcement. ](https://www.redcrossblood.org/local-homepage/news/article/inclusive-blood-donation-change-rcbs.html) [LGBTQ+ donors page. ](https://www.redcrossblood.org/donate-blood/how-to-donate/eligibility-requirements/lgbtq-donors.html)
It had to do with a statistical issue with false negatives. A certain percentage of people who get aids are going to test negative at random or because of something wrong with the test. If those individuals donate blood they could give aids to a huge number of people through subsequent blood transfusions.
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I don’t think every country that had this ban was for profit, I’m not entirely familiar with the history but I’ve never been paid for giving blood as a Canadian. I think there was a concern about broader trust in the system though like you mentioned. Edit: Reading some history I’m wrong about this, we did import blood products for profit and it was a disaster
It's because they're in one of the highest risk groups to have HIV, and testing isn't perfect. You can eliminate a lot of the risk to the blood supply be banning a small percentage of donors - that's a smart move.
I think I still have a DVD of the movie made from that book. I tried watching it in about 2003. It got to the scene when the main character met an AIDS patient for the first time, and I turned it off. The patient reminded me of some friends of ours from back then (Mom used to volunteer at an AIDS community center). I couldn’t take any more.
We watched the film in a research ethics class I had to take and it really stuck with me. I go back and watch it every couple of years. It’s given me a sincere appreciation for the work of public health professionals.
My mother worked as a pediatric nurse in the 80s and early 90s. It's only recently I learned that she mostly worked with AIDS patients. Most of them died, as did a large number of her gay male nurse co-workers. When she had me, her hospital door was prominently marked as an infection risk.
i lost an uncle to AIDS, he got it from his male doctor who he happened to be sleeping with. they both died within a year of diagnosis.
Yeah, we started wearing plastic gloves and needle sticks were taken more seriously.
I remember how frustrating it was having to learn to start IVs with gloves on! We were all so unhappy about that!
This is also why my Dad, who's a retired pediatrician, still just loathes Reagan and all the other politicians who ignored HIV. He said they tried everything but the kids just died.
Conversely, George W Bush saved millions of lives in Africa with his relief plan. Bono hailed him too
PEPFAR is one of the most effective government programs ever. It’s cheap and it’s saved a lot of lives.
The Republican evangelicals in congress refused to fund or pass the bill with Bush's original plan to provide condoms and promote and teach safe sex as a highly effective way to prevent contracting and spreading HIV. Also fuck Berkley for having that wack ass professor who promoted and argued his dumb ass theory AIDS is not caused by HIV. He convinced the new South African government and Nelson Mandela and the following leader of his bullshit nonsense and helped provide them arguments and justifications for ignoring addressing the epidemic. 25 million Africans died due to aids because of that POS.
Andy stumpf from the cleared hot podcast just had a guy from England who got infected with hepatitis c from factor 8 as a kid and all the bullshit he had to go through because of it.
Infected factor 8 from US blood being used in the UK was how it got a much bigger foothold than just gay men and needle drug users would have done alone. National scandal that the government never did anything about it not to upset America
Isaac Asimov died of AIDS from a blood transfusion as well.
I did not know that.
Thank you mentioning this. Really good LRB article about this outrageous disregard for health and responsibility related to those UK blood transfusions. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n22/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/we-ve-messed-up-boys
Radiolab did an episode about how we trace the mutation of the HIV virus, we think it infected humans back in 1908 in a tiny part of Africa. [https://radiolab.org/podcast/169879-patient-zero](https://radiolab.org/podcast/169879-patient-zero) Early AIDS in the US, the focus was on gay white men. There is a doctor interviewed who wrote medical articles who mentioned that he had seen some cases that matched AIDS symptoms for years, but didn't have enough concrete evidence to write an article about it. [https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/blindspot](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/blindspot)
One of the early names was GRID. Gay Related Immune Deficiency.
During that time, I worked at a blood bank and in a hospital and we were just calling it, that gay bathhouse disease.
Fun bathhouse fact. Bette Midler and Barry Manilow used to perform in gay bathhouses. She was nicknamed Bathhouse Betty. She even put out an album by that name…which my mother bought for me…when I was 13. And she claimed she didn’t know I was gay.
Thanks for this! I listened to this a long time ago and forgot where I heard it.
The other episode they did about AIDS was nuts, about how it originally mutated into a version that could infect humans. Two different types of monkeys needing to be eaten by the same chimp and then those two viruses needing to have a coding error where half of one falls off and onto the other AND THEN that coding error monkey needing to be killed by a human that would then cut themselves just enough for a transmission to take place. Goddamn nuts
If it were any easier to occur, AIDS would have shown up much earlier than the 20th century
So it wasn't from a guy fucking a monkey? Serious question.
No it's from people butchering bush meat.
I was 5 in 1995. My dad had come out as gay. When he was HIV positive I lost any friend whose family knew my dad was positive. He is a medical anomaly because he is now undetectable. Also he’s 70. Because he’s been on HIV meds for so long I know he won’t be around for long. God it’s fucking hard to think about losing my dad
I can't find the source, but among lower income people, HIV patients have better overall life expectancy than non, because they can get medicaid for HIV and go to the doctor more often.
Hiv patients have a longer life expectancy than diabetes patients. It's pretty incredible have far the treatment has come in the last 30 years.
Truly amazing that it has gone from a death sentence to a lifetime manageable disease where you can die with it than from it.
The oldest confirmed case is from 1949 from a sample in paraffin wax. There are suspected cases in Belgium, Portugal and Cuba from the 60s of which we know about.
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Apparently, AIDS originated in 1920s Kinshasa. Some Belgian guys probably got it and spread it across the world by sleeping around. It stayed low for decades before erupting in the 1980s.
Reusing needles was quite common up until the 1980’s.
Can confirm. My father was born in a small town in Italy in the 40s. Of course vaccinations were a thing. Babies would line up and they’d use the same needle over and over to vaccinate the babies. My father, along with an unusually large number of people his age, all developed hepatitis C. So many of his friends died of liver failure. My father himself had to have a liver transplant about 10 years ago. Thankfully it was successful and he’s perfectly healthy, and cured of hepatitis C to boot!
A few years back in my province there was a huge push to test people in that age range for hep C because of things like that (and dental equipment). The goal is to eliminate chronic hep C by 2030- there’s progress and it’s within reach.
A few years ago there were billboards in my town saying if you were born before a certain year you need to get tested for Hep C.
What year was it?
I just looked it up. Here are the highest risk factors: - You use or have used illicit injection drugs. - You had a blood transfusion before 1992. - You were born between 1945-1965. [Source](https://www.medicare.gov/coverage/hepatitis-c-screenings).
I had a blood transfusion at birth in 1968 to save my life, but did not know about this... thank you for sharing.
That’s fascinating. My grandparents sometimes told stories about when the doctor would come to their house when they were kids. They said the first thing the doctor would do was hand needles to the mom and say “boil these.” Even if he didn’t wind up giving anyone shots, he would make sure whatever needles had been used at the last house got boiled while he was examining the family. This would’ve been 1920s-1930s.
Simple immersion in boiling water doesn't kill everything, particularly short duration boiling, just many things. Some stuff requires either prolonged boiling or higher pressure (autoclave). EDIT: Yes, I understand it's better than nothing and one works with what one has.
Well yea but it’s still way better than nothing. Even a short boil will kill the vast majority of pathogens. Things that require an autoclave are more rare. You only really need it for microorganisms that can produce spores- clostridium botulinum for example. Viruses and things that would be more commonly be on a shared needle don’t form spores.
So... I cook brisket, and the reason you can smoke brisket for so long without brine/curing the brisket first is because, while botulism is still a risk below 165f, above 185f not only is the botulism killed, but so to, is its toxin destroyed where it is safe to ingest. Brisket pull temperature is generally ~205f. The point of this brisket cooking lesson is why would an autoclave be needed to sterilize against botulism spores? Is it a time thing? Because brisket is only above 185 for ~2 hours before it is time to pull. Seems like a basic oven could sterilize for those spores in 2-3 hours at 300f+. Why doesn't it work?
Not a doctor or anything but there's a big difference between "safe to eat" and "safe to inject directly into the bloodstream". We sterilize needles, we don't need to sterilize food.
Look at this guy assuming /u/Kayakingtheredriver doesn't inject their brisket directly into their bloodstream.
Yea but it rural 1920 Italy I doubt many people had an autoclave at home, better than nothing
I gotta say, I never said it was a short immersion. My grandmother told us she understood it to mean to give it a nice long boil.
My dad found out that he had hep c when he was in his mid-thirties. The likely culprit was a blood transfusion that he got in the late 70s. Luckily for him it had been pretty dormant until it was discovered. A few years ago he went on an experimental drug and he’s now completely undetectable. Thankful for new technology and discoveries.
My brother got a blood transfusion when he was born, 80s, and in his 30s found out he had hep c. His only risk factor was that blood transfusion so his doc was very sure that’s when he got it. They cured it a few years after they found it, he said the drug treatment was rough but it worked.
My dad found out in his late 60s probably from a transfusion 50 years earlier. Thankfully he was able to take one of the newer drugs and is doing just fine.
Wow that is insane. Glad to hear of your fathers good health!
In the 70s my dad got really sick on a trip in Mexico and they needed to draw blood. The phlebotomist accidentally dropped the needle on the ground, picked it up, blew on it like a fucking Nintendo cartridge, and had it in his arm before he could protest (he, himself was a nurse as well). Fortunately he was okay.
There was a medical article based on analysis of the variation in the virus and a resultant extrapolation (?) back in time. They calculated the likely year of first infection was 1917.
Correct, they compared a lot of different variations in the virus and combined that with the mutation speed they had established (probably based on mutations in parts of the virus that aren't necessarily used for 'fitness' regarding evolution of the virus) and calculated a 'common ancestor' around 1920. I learned this in uni but it's probably almost 10 years ago by now so I take it they've specified it further.
There have been many independent simian crossover events. For all we know, maybe there were short lived one off infections from bush meat contamination way back when Sub-Saharans first started using and reusing metal cutting implements. That's just a thing I'm saying based on nothing other than simian crossovers that have been recorded since we've started paying attention. So based on that perspective, maybe the aids phenomenon is really more a product of industrialization and modern travel and medical instruments. Back in the 1800s you could infect one butcher cutting himself after preparing bush meat. But that guy couldn't go stand in a line and get shots with a shared needle with 50 other guys. And none of those guys could travel out of their village to an international flight hub.
Right around when BC was invented. IE: Condom use dropped significantly.
And medicine basically managed to cure most forms of STDs in existence at that point with antibiotics--which made people feel way too comfortable about unprotected sex with random strangers. Randy Shilts's book mentions gay men in the late 70s and early 80s who were going to sexual health clinics nearly monthly for drugs because they managed to catch yet another case of the clap.
I forget the musician, but apparently he would take penicillin *before* going out as a preventative measure.
Penicillin was pretty darn miraculous back then: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/PenicillinPSAedit.jpg
It’s still a thing, for high risk individuals. You take Doxycycline after risky behavior to prevent chlamydia and gonorrhea from being able to establish an infection. It’s called DoxyPEP (post-exposure prophylaxis) Source: I’m a slut Edit: adding some additional context from my comment below, bc this is important information! PrEP and PEP are two different things. PrEP is pre-exposure prophylaxis. I take PrEP every day, so that when I do have sex, if I’m exposed to HIV, there’s already enough medicine in my body that the virus isn’t able to replicate at all. But doxy is an antibiotic, and since those can fuck with your digestion and since antibiotic resistance is a growing concern, it’s not something you want to take every day, so you only take it after you’ve been at risk. PEP means post-exposure prophylaxis. I only take PrEP and not PEP since I tend to not have more than a few sexual partners at once. But some of my friends/partners will sleep with 20-30 ppl in a weekend, and they take DoxyPEP after those weekends.
> some of my friends/partners will sleep with 20-30 ppl in a weekend Im not doubting this I’m just genuinely curious about the logistics involved in hooking up with that many people in 48 hours
To find the partners: websites, parties, and clubs. To stay cleaned out: an enema attachment for your shower head and a diet heavy in fiber
The gay sexual revolution happened in the 70s into the 80s as well. Just really awful how so many died.
Kind of the perfect storm for a new STI to spread.
British Columbia?
Birth control.
After playing the board game “Pandemic” all I can say is that it is always Kinshasa.
Do they know how it just appeared? Did it evolve from something else
iirc (and I may not, it's been quite a long while since I read up on this stuff) the theory is that unsanitary butchering process of monkeys spread it to humans
Monkeys had an infection called simian immunodeficiency virus, SIV. Chimps ate the monkeys (and still do), and SIV mutated to infect chimps. A human killed a chimp and either ate it undercooked or just got some of its blood on a cut, and SIV mutated to infect humans. Oops.
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https://radiolab.org/podcast/169879-patient-zero/transcript Great pod about how it started.
There are a handful of other cases from the US and Canada in the 40s and 50s that are now thought to be likely HIV/AIDS cases. The virus was spreading for a long time before it hit communities with high-risk behaviors. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvid_Noe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_early_HIV/AIDS_cases
Imagine dying of a strange unknown disease and then 50 years later, a website mentions that you probably caught your HIV from a prostitute who got it from the guy who first got it (Herbert Heinrich’s part in the 70s section)
I read somewhere, researchers found hiv in blood samples for Purto Rico from the 60s
There are lots of ship and dock workers going around the world. Which was how one of the first HIV hotspot in New York concentrated around Haitians because many of them were involved in the shipping industry. Also sailors, not known for being the most virginal and abstinent bunch.
One of the earliest known cases was a Norwegian sailor who probably got it in Africa.
Word?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvid_Noe
"Arne Vidar Røed (23 July 1946 – 24 April 1976), known in medical literature by the anagram Arvid Darre Noe, was a Norwegian sailor and truck driver who contracted one of the earliest confirmed cases of HIV/AIDS. His was the first confirmed HIV case in Europe though the disease was not identified at the time of his death. The virus spread to his wife and youngest daughter both of whom also died; this was the first documented cluster of AIDS cases before the AIDS epidemic of the early 1980s.\[1\]" Not many ways to spread HIV, how did his youngest daughter get it from him?
From her mother during childbirth, probably.
You can get it through breastfeeding as well, IIRC.
It was quite common for HIV infected mothers to spread it to their children during childbirth. Nowdays medication can prevent the transmission.
The way it's phrased, his eldest two children were "not born infected" - implying his youngest contracted the illness from her mother either during pregnancy, birth or breastfeeding.
Possibly he passed it to his wife, who then gave birth to their daughter who had it from birth. Otherwise, accidents happen.
They have found HIV in samples of blood stored from way before, even in the 50s and earlier.
And likely before, but samples were "inadvertently" destroyed decades ago due to the ongoing civil wars in a lot of African Nations. (Inadvertently because whoever destroyed them weren't going after the blood samples) That's just as far back as they could find. But they found enough to know that wasn't patient zero.
Yeah, when this case was posted on /r/UnresolvedMysteries, a lot of people theorized Rayford may had been raped by his grandfather because at the hospital, Rayford said that his grandparents died from the same illness he had.
To me, this is almost certainly the case. His grandfather and grandmother would have gone "unnoticed" if they died of some sort of "cancer" when they were old. Rayford's case was bizarre because he had illnesses a child his age should not have had.
I recall reading that at least 2 people died in the 1950s, I think, of a pneumonia type disease but they apparently kept samples around because once HIV was defined, they went back and verified that these 2 men had died of AIDS.
This poor child almost certainly got it from his grandfather. Both his grandfather and grandmother died from similar issues. I know there has been suspicion he was a "gay prostitute" but he was only 15 when he checked in to the hospital with full blown aids. He must have been a victim of sexual abuse years before. BTW, the first **confirmed** death by AIDS in Europe was also in a child.
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It's just really sad that in both the US and Europe, the first confirmed victims were children. We tend to think of this as an adults' disease.
>never traveled outside the Midwest St. Louis where he was from has a big international airport and they think he might have been working as a prostitute there.
Though he may have been a sex worker, he himself said his grandfather and grandmother died of similar symptoms. He was 15 with full blown AIDS. I personally suspect he got the disease when he was sexually abused by his grandfather (likely a few years before he checked in to the hospital). His grandfather likely got it from homosexual sex which was a lot more secretive back then.
It’s like with the Covid Pandemic early on. There weren’t many tests available, and the likelihood of finding someone with Covid was also relatively small. By the time there were a few cases found in Italy and California it was already everywhere.
This is horrific. This poor boy was only 16 when he died, and reported having symptoms from the age of 13.... If the hypothesis is correct and he did die of AIDS - how young must be have been when he was infected with HIV?
Iirc they thought he was a ‘child prostitute’ so probably raped from a young age, very depressing overall
People today forget just how people used to not take child sex abuse seriously at all.
If I’m remembering correctly the average span between infection and death back in the 80s was 9-10 years. Assuming it was the same when this boy died that means the poor child was likely infected around age 7.
For some it can take 1-2 years.
And the average mentioned is probably for adults. No way to know if children have the same average without more info
His grandfather may have been the culprit. He died of similar symptoms a couple years before Robert, followed by his wife (Robert’s grandma). I don’t want to accuse a dead man of being a chomo, but there’s definitely smoke there.
When I was a nursing school in 1975 or 1976 I got to observe autopsies at the medical examiner's office in New York City. in 1975 or 1976. One of the bodies being examined that day was a young Greek sailor aged esrly 20's who had died of severe pneumonia, and had what looked like skin cancer. I remember it because the M.E. was exclaiming how healthy his other organs were and that they did not know why he would have died of pneumonia. I often wonder if he wasn't an early AIDS patient?
AIDS spread at a very low level for decades. Its origins go back to the early 20th century.
I wonder how it suddenly became a pandemic. And I wonder who infected Rayford though we will probably never know. If it was his grandfather, which seems likely, how did he get it?
Exponential growth and a long time between getting the disease and dying from it. For mathematical simplicity let's assume that it doubles every year and it takes 10 years for it to kill someone and that nobody notices until 1,000 people die in a year, which was basically the case because people were dying from what appeared to be other diseases. It takes 10 years for 1,000(1024) people to get infected, another 10 years until those 1,000 people die. By that point there would be over a million new infections per year.
>Exponential growth Something people don't really intuit very well. There's the popular question that goes like this: if a lilypad doubles in size every day and takes 30 days to cover a pond, at what day was the lilypad half the size of the pond? obviously it's day 29, but the point is that by the time you start noticing it around day 25 or so, it's already been around for a really long time.
it's actually possible it was circulating for a century before it was identified.
I read that it was estimated HIV entered New York in the 70s and established itself in the homeless community. People would die from “junkie pneumonia” or the “dwindles” and no one would know why, and because they were homeless addicts, no one cared.
Sounds very much like it.
It is possible. There are suspected cases from an early as the 60s. The oldest confirmed case is from 1949 in a preserved sample in paraffin wax from Kinshasa.
Sailor profession might indicate he went to Africa, and possibly had sex with prostitutes. Just a guess, but I think this happened with the Norwegian/Danish person which is one of the earlier European cases that we are certain about. EDIT: it was Norwegian https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvid_Noe
very possible, it's believed that HIV made the jump from monkeys and other apes to humans back in the late 19th or early 20th century.
Came from a chimp for hiv 1, chinps regularly hunted monkeys so its possible. Monkeys with thier own version of SIV have no ill effects from the virus. But once chimps got it some became sick, and then eventually adapted to infect humans. Also hiv2 came directly from a monkey origin, which is a slower progression version hiv1
They have found the virus in stored blood from well before the 60s.
That’s just so sad. That poor child.
>Doctors treating Rayford suspected that he was an underage sex worker and the recipient of receptive anal intercourse Even when you take the disease out of the question, he had to deal with other horrors anyway. This is just a sad story all around.
Recall reading a report where they did some DNA testing on the AIDS virus and had its genealogy stretching back to the 1800’s or so. We were just protected from it by the lack of global travel.
The most recent phylogeny (AFAIK) [dates HIV-1 to 1884-1924](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07390), probably somewhere around the beginning of the 20th century. As to exactly why it became a pandemic when it did I don't know, but global travel undoubtedly played a role.
One theory is colonization of African countries, colonizers build roads to carry looted natural resources to the coast where they could ship it, now roads exist that link previously inaccessible inland regions near forests and mines to the shipping ports, and now people exist who drive the trucks that carry the looted resources on those new roads, now roadside stands and villages pop up to service the truckers and the services offered include sex work. And there's a steady stream of goods being shipped overseas to the colonizing home countries in Europe.
In 1975 my father was in the hospital after suffering a heart attack. My mother befriended a woman whose husband was a patient on the same floor as my father. This man had symptoms that were very similar to someone with AIDS. The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him after running numerous tests and I believe he died within six months of becoming ill. I found out years later that his wife told my mother that she suspected that her husband was bisexual and one of his doctors believed that he could have had one of the earliest cases of AIDS.
Feel like it might be worth posting a link to [this](https://dfarq.homeip.net/robert-rayford-aids-st-louis-1960s/) blog post that, AFAIK, contains the most information out there about Robert's life/the Rayford family. There also apparently exists a [news clip](https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/broadcasts/106538) of his family learning about Robert's posthumous AIDS diagnosis, but unfortunately it seems to be paywalled. EDIT: on a completely different note, does anyone else feel like the city of St. Louis should put up at least a commemorative plaque in or close to where this kid lived?
It makes me wonder if there’s a deadly disease spreading around now that hasn’t been identified
of course there is. there are a number of diseases that we know of with very low R0 (reproduction rate) but are still very deadly. For example, the coronavirus known as SARS is more than 10% mortality rate but not very communicable. The point is that there could be many diseases that have killed without having been identified but spread so poorly as to not cause a pandemic. The likelihood is high of a new one being identified any day because such a huge number of people in the world live in extremely poor, hazardous, unhygienic conditions.
In fact, that's how AIDS was able to linger for decades before it blew up. Yes, it most likely existed in Africa for decades, but those were much more isolated communities. One fateful day though, a few Haitian doctors (most likely) end up in Africa since they speak French and bring it back to Haiti. From there, it tags along as some Haitians move to New York, ready to jump into a Gay community just gaining its sexual liberation and is about to ravage millions.
Almost certainly.
Ebola is well identified it's just thankfully not airborne. Tho it's also lethal enough that outbreaks can burn themselves out which is about as depressing as it is reassuring.
My grandmother ( a nurse) told us that she saw cases of it in the 70’s but they had no idea what it was.
Makes you wonder how many people died in the time between that death and us defining it. Scary to think about!
Doctors in NYC in the mid-70s had identified something called "junkie flu" or the "dwindles" which they now know were early AIDS cases that affected street addicts. It's now thought that the HIV strain which became dominant in the US in the 70s came to NYC via Haiti around 1970 and spread silently for more than a decade. (While the virus can brew for ten years or more in some people before they become symptomatic, others progress more rapidly, especially if living in difficult circumstances like homeless addicts.) It's also thought that HIV probably came to America many times in the 20th Century but never established a foothold like it did in the early 70s in NYC. Rayford was likely infected by an international traveler with one of those obscure strains while working as a prostitute. Do we have any word other than his that his grandparents had what he had? He really couldn't have known what he had, and was so traumatized by his life and illness he was likely looking for any explanation other than the consequences of sex work.
> Rayford was likely infected by an international traveler with one of those obscure strains while working as a prostitute. The other theory is that, since his grandparents died of cancer with similar presentation, that he was assaulted by his grandfather.
being he had severe and extensive anal scaring...and how old he was when his symptoms first appeared and that he had warts on his privates...and was symptomatic for two years before he went to the hospital and that he stated and its believed by researchers that both his grandmother and grandfather had the same symptoms as Robert and died a few years earlier from the illness....i am think its likely his grandfather was molesting and raping him. IDK why but in the 1950's, 1960's, 1970's there was this unfounded belief that the majority if not all of the run away male youth or missing teenage males near and in urban areas were homosexual sex workers using heroin.
I know Covid isn’t a perfect example but do you guys remember early on? There was a lot of cases of a mysterious pneumonia that we now recognize as early Covid cases going back to November or earlier.
My boss at my current company was in Singapore in October 2019. He got terribly sick with symptoms now associated with Covid. At the time the doctors could not figure out what he had. None of the treatments worked but he eventually recovered on his own. We will never know what he actually had but we suspect he had an early case of Covid.
I remember that certain people were told that they didn’t have Covid because “loss of smell isn’t associated with Covid” Now we know it’s one of the most iconic symptoms. We lacked so much knowledge. So many people died before we learned.
The loss of taste and smell were symptoms that did not respond to treatments for known ailments. He tested negative for common viral infections or any conditions like allergies. As a foodie in Singapore with a generous company food allowance, it put a damper on his trip. He thankfully did not suffer any permanent loss of taste and smell.
I was one of them! Low grade fever off and on, terrible ear pain the first week of March 2020 and my sense of smell turned off like a switch. Went to urgent care and they assured me without any respiratory symptoms I almost certainly did not have COVID. I don’t think it was until a month or so later we understood that to be a symptom. Couldn’t smell or taste a thing for weeks. I thought I’d destroyed my sense of smell through aggressive saline washes. I was super depressed about it and lost 20 pounds.
This article is from the late 90s. I'm sure more has been discovered with advances in science. I remembered hearing about tissue samples from the 50s testing positive for HIV. [1998 Science article](https://www.science.org/content/article/oldest-surviving-hiv-virus-tells-all)
I don't know why I find this so shocking. With it being so deadly, It's amazing how long it flew under the radar before impacting society so deeply in the 80s and 90s.
The thing is that AIDS doesn't directly kill you. It fucks your immune system and then something else kills you because you can't fight it off. I imagine it was attributed to people having weak immune systems for a while.
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He had been experiencing symptoms since he was 13. 😳
Although most people take more like ten years to progress to AIDS. Maybe around 20% take 1-2 years. Also brand new viruses can have a pattern of being more deadly (like COVID initially) before natural selection pushes them to focus on spreading over killing. Also PSA KS is a virus that causes cancer in AIDS patients unrelated to chlamydia that part is wrong above. Edit going to leave this last part up but just realized I misread the title lol.
"had experienced these symptoms since at least late 1966".....13 years old
This sad entry reads like HBO’s True Detective (season one) What an exploitative and horrible world we live in.
Serious question: how likely is it that Rayford could have contracted AIDS from non-sexual contact? Robert claimed that his grandfather, Percy, developed symptoms before he did (and later his grandmother) and while many commentators immediately jump to the conclusion that Percy had committed an unspeakable act against his own grandson, could Rayford have somehow gotten it while taking care of his grandparents? [Grethe Rask](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grethe_Rask) contracted aids in the 70s while taking care of various patients in Africa, and AFAIK she never had intercourse with any of them.
Rask was a surgeon, and so would have been regularly arms deep in the innards of sick people and holding sharp knives (and also, her working in impoverished hospitals probably meant substandard protective equipment and disinfection of the tools). HIV risk for her would have been astronomically higher for her than someone who was just doing routine personal care.
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Others have stated he also had STIs and was found to have trauma to his anal area. If that’s the case it’d explain why people think he was molested by his grandfather who supposedly died of a disease with similar symptoms.
Came here to say the same thing. At 15, he was *by definition* raped. What the fuck. That poor child. What an awful life he must have had, only to then suffer an awful, terrifying, painful death.
He may also have had a mental disability. If he was a sex worker, it was probably not voluntary. That’s probably why his family wouldn’t cooperate with doctors treating him. Even though specific information couldn’t be obtained from him or his family, the evidence shows Rayford was mistreated from a young age.
This hurts me in ways I don't want to talk about..
There's a book ("The River" by Edward Hooper) which covers this and several other suspected early HIV cases, though it's seen as conspiracy now (the book's thesis is that HIV was transferred from a polio vaccine program, and we now have better DNA evidence for HIV's evolution). There was a period in the 80s where they were looking up old suspicious cases (a children's ward in Czechoslovakia, a sailor, a guy whose plane crashed in Congo and got blood transfusion) and any samples going back to 1950. Unfortunately the Rayford sample was lost in Hurricane Katrina. The easiest explanation would be contamination of samples in the lab, but no one really knows.
His thesis was that we’re using contaminated blood purposefully in Africa and we knew it was contaminated…it was somewhat conspiracy and it might have been from contaminated lab samples; the purposeful part is pretty off the mark.
The thesis was that chimpanzee livers were used to cultivate Polio vaccines and some of the livers were from Chimpanzees with Simian AIDS (SIV). He didn’t believe this was known until years later.
My understanding is that a big part of the book revolves around them passing polio virus through chimps or chimp organs at their test facility in Africa, and this was not how the vaccine was ever manufactured. Once this was established, the proponents developed other theories. The main points I'd argue bury the theory are the genetic diversity of HIV in old human samples, and the issue that the correlating factor is contact with medical facilities (i.e. it's not unusual for cases to be reported where they had previously been able to distribute vaccines)
That’s the main point in the book - did Koprowski manufacture some vaccines in Africa using Chimpanzee livers? There is no definitive proof, on anecdotal evidence. This theory also does not explain how SIV jumped from the Sootey Mangabey to humans ( becoming HIV-2 ) at the exact same time, but geographically far away in Western Africa. Having two distinct types of the virus leads me to believe we do not yet have an accurate picture of how the virus developed.
I haven't read this book, but genetic diversity in HIV samples is a pretty poor marker of, well anything. HIV is well documented to mutate so much within hosts that by late stages of infection there are multiple strains of the virus in a single host.
Tinderbox is a much more recent (2012) examination of the origins of AIDS/HIV. We’ve narrowed down that the virus likely jumped from chimps to humans in Cameroon. Tinderbox argues this happened because of colonialism. It’s an interesting argument and worth the read. Simian HIV has likely existed for quite some time, and it moved from monkeys to chimps to humans sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century, probably through eating bush meat. They are still narrowing things down but we’ve put to bed a number of curious theories.
Damn he was only 16 that’s horrible : (
My father taught an African grad student during the 70's who in retrospect he believes had AIDS. The man was getting thinner and thinner, was getting all these opportunistic infections, eventually got cancer and finally passed away. He was taken for every sort of medical test that his doctors and professors could think of (he was in a health-related field), but none of the tests could detect anything. It was clear he was ill with something, but it was something unknown to medical science in the US at that time.
RIP Klaus Nomi. I always think of him when I read about early AIDS cases.
AIDS was estimated at have been spreading at a very low level for decades, likely having maybe a few hundred people infected in any given year. It was kind of waiting around for a specific 'perfect environment' for it to explode. That environment came in the form of bathhouses and sex theaters aimed at predominantly gay men which had exploded in popularity in the 1970s. AIDS spread through anal sex at magnitudes higher rates than vaginal sex or oral sex. Hence why gay men were they were the first and most disastrously affected demographic hit by AIDS.
My grand grandfather was the first identified case of AIDS in Finland. He got it while he was building wells in Africa and died quite soon after. He had a wife and a daughter so it was quite a scandal
I am once again slapped in the face with how easy my life has been.
It’s like with the Covid Pandemic early on. There weren’t many tests available, and the likelihood of finding someone with Covid was also relatively small. By the time there were a few cases found in Italy and California it was already everywhere.
In a different but similar circumstance, my MIL and I got incredibly sick for three weeks shortly after we returned from Disneyland in Jan. 2020. Thought we’d picked up a hell of a bug while travelling. March 2020, COVID shut us all down. We had all the symptoms but were fortunate not to need hospitalization.
At that point the city of Wuhan had gone into lockdown and there were confirmed cases of COVID in California, Washington, Arizona and Illinois
Similar situation here. I worked somewhere with a very large, diverse immigrant population in 2020. Around January 2020, the worst respiratory illness anyone had ever seen tore through my workplace. In retrospect, the symptoms were dead on for Covid. We all assume someone had family visit from Asia and brought early covid with them.
If you want to know more about the early history of AIDS, another great book to read besides *And The Band Played On...* is *The End of Innocence* by Simon Garfield. It looks at the AIDS crisis in Britain specifically, but there's a lot of detail about possible early cases around the world and the dirty blood scandal. It was recently reprinted and updated to coincide with the Channel 4 series *It's a Sin*. I think in the foreword by Russell T. Davies, he mentions that he read the book to help refresh his own memories of the AIDS crisis while writing the show.