1959-1979: ‘The Silent Epidemic’

“At some point in the 1970s, unbeknownst to the world, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) gained a foothold and began its insidious spread, forever dividing the twentieth century into two eras – before and after AIDS” – the World Health Organization

HIV came to the international attention of the medical and science community in the early 1980’s, but previous to this, it had quietly made its way across several continents. Retrospective analysis of blood and patterns of deaths from common opportunistic infections, now known to be AIDS-defining, have now been attributed to HIV. These cases from the mid and late 1970s were the beginning of the epidemic as we know it today. We know that HIV certainly existed in Africa before the first official case has been attributed, with new research tracing it back to 1920s Kinshasa. However, there is no evidence to show that HIV was epidemic until well into the 1970s.