Wasn't there a British sailor in the late 1950's who contracted a mysterious disease that had AIDS like symptoms? I remember reading that blood samples taken from him tested positive for HIV.
I remember a newspaper article about a black teenager, I think in the 1960s, in St. Louis (?), who died of a mysterious disease...the doctors were totally mystified and the patient had been uncommunicative, so they saved a blood sample, and after the AIDS epidemic gained publicity the blood was tested and turned out the boy had had AIDS.
The case of the sailor is unclear - the samples were contaminated in the laboratory.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_origin
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1955-1957: British sailor
The oldest documented possible case of the then-unknown syndrome was thought to have been detected in 1959, when a 25-year-old British sailor who had traveled in the navy between 1955 and 1957 (but apparently not to Africa), sought help at the Royal Infirmary of Manchester, England. He reported to have been suffering from puzzling symptoms, among them purplish skin lesions, for nearly two years. His condition had taken a turn for worse during Christmas 1958, when he started suffering from shortness of breath, extreme fatigue, rapid weight loss, night sweats and high fever. The doctors thought he might be suffering from tuberculosis and, even though they found no evidence of bacterial infection, they treated him for tuberculosis just to be safe, to no avail. The sailor continued to weaken and he died shortly after in August 1959. His autopsy revealed evidence of two unusual infections, cytomegalovirus and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP, later, when redetermined as P. jirovecii, renamed Pneumocystis pneumonia), very rare at the time but now commonly associated with AIDS patients. His case had puzzled his doctors, who preserved tissue samples from him and for years retained some interest in solving the mystery. Sir Robert Platt, then president of the Royal College of Physicians, wrote in the sailor’s hospital chart that he wondered “if we are in for a new wave of virus disease now that the bacterial illnesses are so nearly conquered”. It was only 31 years later, after the AIDS pandemic had become well-known and widespread, that they decided to perform HIV-tests on the preserved tissues of the sailor, which initially turned out a positive result. The case was reported in the July 7, 1990 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet; their claim was retracted in a letter in the January 20, 1996 issue where they admitted that the tissue sample was contaminated in the laboratory (Corbitt G, Bailey A, Williams G. HIV infection in Manchester, 1959 . Lancet 1990; ii: 51.)[21][22]
1959: Congolese man
One of the earliest documented HIV-1 infection was discovered in a preserved blood sample taken in 1959 from a man from Leopoldville, Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo).[23] However, it is unknown whether this anonymous person ever developed AIDS and died of its complications. [24]
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There is a poorly documented case of a waitress or stewardess (I forget which) on the West Coast who seemed to has what we’d call AIDS-like symptoms today... in 1954.