North America’s first AIDS case

Robert Rayford, a teenager from St Louis, Missouri, is the first person documented to have died from AIDS-related causes in North America. At the time doctors are not aware of HIV and are unable to diagnose his mysterious illness. They find that he has a low white-blood cell count and purple lesions associated with Kaposi’s Sarcoma, an AIDS-defining illness. These records along with blood and tissue samples taken at the time, allow Robert to be diagnosed decades after his death. His case raises questions around how HIV arrived in the USA as well as why the epidemic did not break-out sooner