Origin

The origin of AIDS is thought to have been first contracted from humans who ate non-game animals such as chimpanzees. Animals such as chimpanzees and mangabey monkeys in west Africa are naturally infected with the SIV virus that is genetically related to the HIV virus. The first case of a man who died from AIDS was in 1959 in what is known today as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We first started seeing this disease in the U.S. in 1981 as multiple people in California, particularly homosexual males, were coming down with cases of pneumocystis pneumonia, and a rare form of skin cancer know as Kaposi's sarcoma. These cases were found only in individuals with compromised immune systems, and by 1983 the virus causing the loss of immune function had been identified as HIV. Today approximately 33 million people in the world are infected with HIV, 67% of those people live in sub-Saharan Africa.