How was AIDS a surprise?

[kevin]

So I'm not sure what you mean by the topic here. On the one hand you are saying the medical community shouldn't have been surprised that the behavior of gay men in the 70s led to a new pandemic

Not what i'm trying to say at all. I'm saying the reason they WERE surprised is they were looking for an STD and found a pandemic. I'm not trying to claim they should have been looking for a pandemic. There would have been no reason too as pandemics in the past were not slow incubating types.

I'm attempting to answer the question "why were they surprised by aids", not "should they have been looking for a pandemic."

 

[kevin]

It appears to me that huge amounts of money have been spent on AIDS, with little benefit to the victims and none to potential victims, other than education about the risk.

Current medication adds an average of 13 years life expectancy (if I'm remembering correctly) to the typical AIDS patient. Some might consider an extra 13 years to be more than a little benefit.

I believe there are a couple of possible vaccines under human testing now.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

...

I'm attempting to answer the question "why were they surprised by aids", not "should they have been looking for a pandemic."

Just who was surprised and why do you think that?

As for a slowly incubating disease becoming a new pandemic, again, in the infectious disease medical community, it's well known that the faster something kills the quicker it burns out.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Excellent links and summaries, Skeptigirl.

One thing that has puzzled me is why in the early days of the epidemic people did not predict how widely the disease might spread into other risk groups. It was a blood borne/sexually spread virus, so parallels could readily be drawn with Hep B transmission, but they weren't.

The other rather confusing thing about the pandemic was why such high prevalence rates are achievable in many countries - 30% or so. HIV is actually far less infectious than Hep B so people questioned the science behind a virus STD causing such a major problem. However, HIV seems to spread more readily in certain circumstances, and people are infectious for far longer (with Hep B only perhaps for 3 months or so on average, and only 10% become long term carriers capable of transmitting on the virus after this). With HIV infection, everyone infected becomes a "carrier" so this explains why high prevalences are possible in practice.

Thanks.

To answer your other questions, the medical community predicted exactly how HIV would be spread. It was the political community that on the one hand claimed they shouldn't allow infected children to go to school and on the other hand, put their heads in the sand as if they were not at risk if they weren't gay men or IVD users.

HIV has not spread more readily than Hep B. It's that 85% of the people with hep B are not ill while close to 100% of those with HIV are. But there are some differences. HIV is more readily spread via vaginal intercourse than hep B. Hep B is more readily spread through small blood exposures than HIV. There were 12,000 hep B infections a year in the USA prior to the vaccine. Yet after 20 years of HIV risk in the USA to health care workers there are less than a few hundred occupational HIV infections total.

There are also only a few hundred cases of occupationally acquired hep C cases in health care workers and while HCV is spread sexually, it isn't easily transmitted that way. But in the IVDU population, prevalence rates are consistently >70%. It's an interesting pattern.

 

[Kiwiwriter]

My brush with AIDS history

This takes me back 30 years, to my senior year in high school.

My chemistry teacher, Matthew Litwin, a dead ringer for Freddie Mercury, gave us a lot of lectures on why we should all -- not some of us -- ALL become biochemists. He pointed out that in the future, there would be a great need for biochemists to do research, and the field was undermanned and needed more. WE ALL HAD TO BECOME BIOCHEMISTS. Those of us who did not want to become biochemists were worse than dirt.

I presumed this was a mere case of a high school teacher determined that all of his students take up his subject as a career. I heard the same rubbish from physics, biology, and even French teachers.

When AIDS exploded in 1984, one of the many things I read about the disease was that before it hit, gay men were reporting a "gay flu" in the late 1970s, of mysterious origin and fatal results.

Now I knew -- as did everyone else in the school -- that Litwin was gay. He and his boyfriend had come in one day to use the tennis court in the small gym, and requested locker space and locks.

When I saw the story about "gay flu," it dawned on me as to why Litwin wanted more biochemists -- his pals were getting "gay flu."

In 1994, he died of AIDS. I then realized that he probably knew a lot more about "gay flu" than I had thought.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

This takes me back 30 years, to my senior year in high school.

My chemistry teacher, Matthew Litwin, ...
When AIDS exploded in 1984, one of the many things I read about the disease was that before it hit, gay men were reporting a "gay flu" in the late 1970s, of mysterious origin and fatal results....
When I saw the story about "gay flu," it dawned on me as to why Litwin wanted more biochemists -- his pals were getting "gay flu."....

I think this is a stretch here. The first HIV case in the USA that I'm aware of was ill in the late 70s. Patient zero who wasn't really the first case but did have sex with ~40 of the first 250 cases was spreading the disease in about 1980.

To be worried about "gay flu" one would first have to recognize it was a serious disease. That would mean an HIV infection had progressed to AIDS. Those first 250 or so cases ~1980 +/- 2 years could have been known to anyone in the gay community but I don't think anyone would have been suspicious much earlier than 1978.

HIV cases in the USA, last 20 years

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

The media are full of stories about the 25 anniversary of AIDS being identified, and talk about how mysterious it was. From what I’ve heard of rampant homosexual promiscuity and drug addicts "renting" needles, I don't see how it could have been much of a surprise.

How old are you? There were certainly expectations by some that homosexuals and drug users would get their due. But that was nothing new. And even those people expected it to come in the form of syphilis, insanity, or political intervention. No one anticipated AIDS. When it first appeared, the disease was a complete mystery. It took some time before scientists figured out what the disease was and how it worked. This might help you appreciate the end of Forrest Gump a little better.