Pre-AIDS being known

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I wonder looking back in the 70s how many people in North America actually died of AIDS. I find it eeriely odd there were not that many cases in the 70s then bam in 1981 it's out like a rash. By the looks of things HIV started to spread in the 60s & 70s.

I wonder looking back now if anyone here has any testimonials or recollections of people they knew who may have been sick and died of AIDS in the 70s?

The first recognized AIDS death in the United States is now thought to be a 16 year old boy from St. Louis, Missouri, who died in 1969. He had been showing symptoms since 1966 at the latest, had never traveled outside the midwest, or had a blood transfusion. Going with the low estimate of a five year latency period would mean that HIV was present in the US by the early 1960's.

Back in 1979, here in Australia, a friend and workmate of mine was hospitalised with a pneumonia that came out of nowhere, and was dead eight days later. She had skin lesions that couldn't be identified, a brain parasite that no-one (at the time) had ever seen, and all her primary organs, especially liver, kidneys and spleen, went into meltdown and failed completely over a matter of just a few days. The doctors apparently admitted they couldn't make sense of it, because her official cause of death was "unknown".

It was too early for anyone to have the knowledge to identify her illness as AIDS, but she was a fiercely active IV drug user who went to parties and shared needles, including with her flatmate, who was gay and an airline steward on international routes.

The first widely-acknowledged death from AIDS in Australia was Bobby Goldsmith, a gay athlete, but that wasn't until 1984. I can't be sure AIDS was what took Sally in 1979, but it sure sounds like that was what it was.



You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

If you are interested in the history of AIDS (from the first known cases up to the late 1980s), you should read the book And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts. Although some of his epidemiological conclusions (including his assertion that Gaetan Dugas, whom he dubbed "Patient Zero," was heavily responsible alone for the transmission of HIV in North America) have been disputed, Shilts's histories of the first AIDS patients and activists are vividly and compellingly written.

Shilts does spend some time discussing pre-1981 cases of HIV/AIDS. Some of the ones he discusses (along with some others that were rediscovered after he wrote his book) are:

Robert Rayford
A fifteen-year-old American teenager who died in 1969 (!) but whose illness was not rediagnosed as AIDS until 1984:
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/28/us/boy-s-1969-death-suggests-aids-invaded-us-several-times.html

Arne Vidar Røed (aka Arvid Noe for anonymity)
A Norwegian sailor and truck driver who traveled widely. Not only did he die in 1976 of a disease that was later determined to be AIDS, but he also unknowingly spread it to his wife and daughter, who also died before any doctor knew what HIV/AIDS was.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/bodyhorrors/2012/10/22/aids_in_pre_aids_era/#.V9Ayh7UmLvE

Grethe Rask
A Danish doctor who likely contracted HIV while practicing in Zaire, she died in 1977 of a mystery disease that was only later discovered to have been HIV/AIDS.
https://books.google.com/books?id=cGNetxKuLnMC&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=grethe+rask&source=bl&ots=FL7LpPQHvU&sig=VsoG42FMSfq29EAXKqLJJSMrNdI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjDhZfky_3OAhVKOyYKHV08AowQ6AEIUTAM#v=onepage&q=grethe%20rask&f=false

Ken Horne
The first recognized AIDS patient in the US, Horn was reported to the CDC in 1980, a year before the CDC's 1981 "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report" on what would become known as HIV/AIDS (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/june_5.htm) or the New York Times's first article (http://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/03/us/rare-cancer-seen-in-41-homosexuals.html), also in 1981.