From ignorance to a potential cure: the history of HIV breakthroughs

From ignorance to a potential cure: the history of HIV breakthroughs The news that a man in London has potentially been “cured” of HIV through a stem cell transplant shows how far the world has come since Aids first burst into global consciousness in the 1980s.

HIV is thought to have originated in the 1920s in Leopoldville, the capital of the Belgian colony of Congo when the virus crossed from monkeys into humans and was spread through prostitution.

How many people were infected in the early 20th century is unknown and first reports of what we now know as Aids came in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when groups of gay men began to report a rare lung infection and an unusually aggressive cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma. The Daily Telegraph