It was those darn Village People, even if they weren’t all gay.
Seriously, who knows how many people died of “fever of unknown origin” etc. over the years before enough public health officials decided the mysterious deaths had something in common.
I gather medicine has had all manner of imaginative terms for WTF? over the centuries.
I thought Reagan caused AIDS because of his hatred of the gay community.
But then, I thought we are all at risk of AIDS, and that AIDS is not a gay disease.
I guess Reagan forced certain people into risky behaviors so he could use them for political gain. IV drug users are another big group of AIDS victims. Remember “just say no” to drugs? Obviously Reagan hated drug users too.
When your immune system is compromised, there is always something else it can get classified as.
They probably weren’t dying of WTF, but one or more diseases that had been diagnosed with little defense.
The legacy of the sexual revolution lives on. Revolutionaries take their toll on the populace and stack up the bodies.
Michael Gottlieb's paper in the December, 1981 New England Journal of Medicine clearly described a new disease. His detailed description of the five patients was so comprehensive and clear that if the paper was the only thing you ever read on the subject, you could pick out an AIDS patient on the street anywhere in the world, today.
In 1970-79, there was an average of 1-3 patients/year admitted to the Mama Yemo hospital in Kinshasa with cryptococcal meningitis. In 1980 and afterward, there were more than one hundred/year. Clearly, the staff there were seeing something new, as well.
At the First International AIDS Conference in Atlanta, in 1986, the Russians presented the first two cases from the former USSR. By 1990, there were tens of thousands.
As late as 1990, scientists from India were promoting the ideas that genetic resistance and/or superior virtue presented an impenetrable barrier to AIDS on the subcontinent. There are now more cases there than anywhere else in the world.