| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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triggered a wave of panic around the world with questions pertaining to its name, cause, mode of transmission, and treatment options. For example, because AIDS was first diagnosed among the gay community in the United States, in the early days it was generally thought to affect only homosexuals and thus named the gay-related immunodeficiency (GRID) (Gottlieb, 1981). Far from the United States and in the middle of sub-Saharan Africa, where the same disease was quietly but rapidly spreading, as the public watched large numbers of people become very ill and extremely skinny with manifestations of a multitude of opportunistic illnesses, one of which is referred to as the wasting syndrome before they died. The new disease was initially named Slim or Mukenenya by the Baganda in Uganda. Mukenenya means something that makes a person extremely thin or emaciated. Not until 1982 was “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” (AIDS) coined as the name for this new and mysterious illness (Harden, 1992). Currently, although individuals in Uganda know that it is AIDS, they still refer to it as Slim and Mukenenya.
Moreover, the naming of AIDS was followed by an urgent need to identify the disease-causing agent, which was necessary for prevention and treatment purposes. Among the many scientists around the world who focused on this endeavor were Dr. Luc Montagnier at the Pasteur Institute in France and Dr. Jay A. Levy at the University of California, San Francisco. They succeeded in the discovery of the type of retrovirus that causes AIDS in 1983, which Montagnier named the lymphadenopathy associated virus (LAV) and Levy the AIDS-associated retrovirus (ARV). Likewise, in 1984 Dr. Robert Gallo and scientists at the National Cancer Institute in the United States also discovered the two retroviruses that cause AIDS and named them HTLV-I and HTLV-II (Gottlieb, 1981). Controversy about the initial discovery of this agent arose. Mediated by the respective political heads of states for the United States and France at the time, the founding scientists agreed to share credit for what was considered the same discovery, and the AIDS-causing agent was given a common name in 1987, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) (Gottlieb, 1981).
Unfortunately, these discoveries did not ease public fears of AIDS because information about the mode of HIV exposure was still a mystery.